Journal article
Design and analysis of synthetic carbon fixation pathways
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol.107(19), pp.8889-8894
May/2010
Abstract
Carbon fixation is the process by which CO(2) is incorporated into organic compounds. In modern agriculture in which water, light, and nutrients can be abundant, carbon fixation could become a significant growth-limiting factor. Hence, increasing the fixation rate is of major importance in the road toward sustainability in food and energy production. There have been recent attempts to improve the rate and specificity of Rubisco, the carboxylating enzyme operating in the Calvin-Benson cycle; however, they have achieved only limited success. Nature employs several alternative carbon fixation pathways, which prompted us to ask whether more efficient novel synthetic cycles could be devised. Using the entire repertoire of approximately 5,000 metabolic enzymes known to occur in nature, we computationally identified alternative carbon fixation pathways that combine existing metabolic building blocks from various organisms. We compared the natural and synthetic pathways based on physicochemical criteria that include kinetics, energetics, and topology. Our study suggests that some of the proposed synthetic pathways could have significant quantitative advantages over their natural counterparts, such as the overall kinetic rate. One such cycle, which is predicted to be two to three times faster than the Calvin-Benson cycle, employs the most effective carboxylating enzyme, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase, using the core of the naturally evolved C4 cycle. Although implementing such alternative cycles presents daunting challenges related to expression levels, activity, stability, localization, and regulation, we believe our findings suggest exciting avenues of exploration in the grand challenge of enhancing food and renewable fuel production via metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.
Details
- Title
- Design and analysis of synthetic carbon fixation pathways
- Creators
- Arren Bar-Even (null) - 972WIS_INST___110Elad Noor (null) - 972WIS_INST___110Nathan E. Lewis (null)Ron Milo (null) - 972WIS_INST___110
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol.107(19), pp.8889-8894; May/2010
- Number of pages
- 6
- Language
- English
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0907176107
- Grant note
- Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; Kahn Systems Biology Foundation; National Science Foundation [DGE-0504645]; Fulbright; Israel Science Foundation [750/09]; Yeda-Sela, Mr. and Mrs. Yossie Hollander and Miel de Botton Aynsley fundsWe are grateful to the following people who provided us with vital feedback on this study: Asaph Aharoni, Niv Antonovsky, Naama Barkai, Anton Bryksin, Oliver Ebenhoeh, Idan Frumin, Georg Fuchs, Gad Galili, Michael Gurevitz, Roxanne Halper, Ran Kafri, Aaron Kaplan, Wolfram Liebermeister, Ichiro Matsumura, Yehuda Marcus, Amir Mitchell, Armindo Salvador, Tomer Shlomi, Dan Tawfik, Assaf Vardi, and Itai YBoukstein career development chair. A. B.-E. is supported by the Adams Fellowship Program of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. E.N. is supported in part by the Kahn Systems Biology Foundation. This work was funded in part by National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Plant Systems Biology Training Grant DGE-0504645 (to N.E.L.) and a Fulbright fellowship (to N.E.L.).anai. The authors would like to acknowledge Ani Manichaikul, Roger Chang, Jason Papin, and Bernhard Palsson for providing the constraint-based model of Chlamydomonas. This research was supported by Israel Science Foundation (Grant 750/09) and the Yeda-Sela, Mr. and Mrs. Yossie Hollander and Miel de Botton Aynsley funds. R. M. is incumbent of the Anna and Maurice_ALMAME_DELIMITER_
- Record Identifier
- 993265174503596
Metrics
10 Record Views