Title	Adaptation to the coupling of glycolysis to toxic methylglyoxal production in tpiA deletion strains of Escherichia coli requires synchronized and counterintuitive genetic changes.
Year of Publication	2018
Authors	D. McCloskey; S. Xu; T.E. Sandberg; E. Brunk; Y. Hefner; R. Szubin; A.M. Feist; B.O. Palsson
Journal	PLoS Comput Biol
Abstract	Methylglyoxal is a highly toxic metabolite that can be produced in all living organisms. Methylglyoxal was artificially elevated by removal of the tpiA gene from a growth optimized Escherichia coli strain. The initial response to elevated methylglyoxal and its toxicity was characterized, and detoxification mechanisms were studied using adaptive laboratory evolution. We found that: 1) Multi-omics analysis revealed biological consequences of methylglyoxal toxicity, which included attack on macromolecules including DNA and RNA and perturbation of nucleotide levels; 2) Counter-intuitive cross-talk between carbon starvation and inorganic phosphate signalling was revealed in the tpiA deletion strain that required mutations in inorganic phosphate signalling mechanisms to alleviate; and 3) The split flux through lower glycolysis depleted glycolytic intermediates requiring a host of synchronized and coordinated mutations in non-intuitive network locations in order to re-adjust the metabolic flux map to achieve optimal growth. Such mutations included a systematic inactivation of the Phosphotransferase System (PTS) and alterations in cell wall biosynthesis enzyme activity. This study demonstrated that deletion of major metabolic genes followed by ALE was a productive approach to gain novel insight into the systems biology underlying optimal phenotypic states.
PubMed ID	PubMed