08/16/2010
Solving the Mystery of Metabolism in Clostridium acetobutylicum – an Important Biofuel Producer
Summary
The bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum produces butanol, ethanol, and hydrogen as end products of biomass fermentation and is already has industrial uses. C. acetobutylicum also serves as a model for an important class of soil-based organisms mediating carbon degradation in terrestrial ecosystems. However, scientists have not been able to map this organism’s metabolic processes since the genes encoding several key enzymes necessary for basic cell physiology seem to be missing. DOE scientists at Princeton University have used an innovative approach to resolve this mystery. By following the incorporation of radiolabeled carbon into various intermediate compounds, they identified a unique series of reactions used in carbon conversion and developed the first ever quantitative model of metabolic flux for C. acetobutylicum. These results provide critical information on the pathway used by these organisms to perform important processes in the global carbon cycle and greatly enhance the prospects of being able to engineer Clostridia’s metabolism for biofuels synthesis. The research has just been published on-line in the Journal of Bacteriology.
References
D. Amador-Noguez, X.-J. Feng, J. Fan, N. Roquet, H. Rabitz and J. D. Rabinowitz. 2010 “Systems-level metabolic flux profiling elucidates a complete, bifurcated TCA cycle in Clostridium acetobutylicum”, J. Bacteriology, (2010) doi:10.1128/JB.00490-10.