Metabolic pathways articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    A bacterial enzyme is characterized and demonstrated to have Ni2+-dependent activity and high specificity for free guanidine enabling the bacteria to use guanidine as the sole nitrogen source for growth.

    • D. Funck
    • , M. Sinn
    •  & J. S. Hartig

  • Letter |

    Microbial generation of a terminal-alkyne-containing amino acid can be encoded into E. coli and provides the potential for in vivo generation of proteins and natural products for click chemistry.

    • J. A. Marchand
    • , M. E. Neugebauer
    •  & M. C. Y. Chang

  • Article |

    This study identifies a crucial role for fatty acid oxidation (FAO) in endothelial cells during angiogenesis, and reveals that fatty-acid-derived carbons are used for the de novo synthesis of nucleotides, and hence FAO stimulates vessel sprouting by increasing endothelial cell proliferation.

    • Sandra Schoors
    • , Ulrike Bruning
    •  & Peter Carmeliet

  • Letter |

    Here, the authors identify a previously unknown regulatory strategy used by Escherichia coli to control end-product levels of the pyrimidine biosynthetic pathway: this involves feedback regulation of the near-terminal pathway enzyme UMP kinase, with accumulation of UMP prevented by its degradation to uridine through UmpH, a phosphatase with a previously unknown function.

    • Marshall Louis Reaves
    • , Brian D. Young
    •  & Joshua D. Rabinowitz

  • Letter |

    The epoxidase PaaABCE, which converts phenylacetyl-CoA into its ring-1,2-epoxide, is shown to be also able to mediate the NADPH-dependent removal of that epoxide, ensuring that the intracellular concentrations of the toxic epoxide does not exceed a certain ‘acceptable’ concentration.

    • Robin Teufel
    • , Thorsten Friedrich
    •  & Georg Fuchs

  • Letter |

    NMR spectroscopy is used to elucidate the intermediates in the bacterial transformation of alkylphosphonates to phosphate, showing that the essential bond cleavage occurs in a radical-based reaction in the presence of S-adenosyl-l-methionine.

    • Siddhesh S. Kamat
    • , Howard J. Williams
    •  & Frank M. Raushel

  • News & Views |

    Plants and fungi follow a complex route to make the vitamin thiamine for carbohydrate metabolism. One of the pathway's protein participants turns out to be a surprising player, sacrificing its own activity in the process. See Letter p.542

    • Peter Roach

  • News & Views |

    An extension of synthetic biology to a medicinal plant involves the transfer of chlorination equipment from bacteria. This exercise adds implements to the enzymatic toolbox for generating natural products. See Letter p.461

    • Joseph P. Noel

  • Letter |

    These authors identify the human enzyme responsible for menaquinone-4 biosynthesis, a naturally occurring form of vitamin K. They find that UbiA prenyltransferase containing 1, a human homologue of a prenyltransferase gene from Escherichia coli, encodes an enzyme that can convert vitamin K derivatives into menaquinone-4.

    • Kimie Nakagawa
    • , Yoshihisa Hirota
    •  & Toshio Okano

  • Letter |

    A central hub of carbon metabolism is the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, which serves to connect the processes of glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, respiration, amino acid synthesis and other biosynthetic pathways. These authors show that TCA metabolism in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is largely disconnected from glycolysis and is organized along a fundamentally different architecture — not cyclic, but branched — from the canonical textbook pathway.

    • Kellen L. Olszewski
    • , Michael W. Mather
    •  & Manuel Llinás

  • Letter |

    Network theory has become pervasive in all sectors of biology, from biochemical signalling to human societies, but identification of relevant functional communities has been impaired by many nodes belonging to several overlapping groups at once, and by hierarchical structures. These authors offer a radically different viewpoint, focusing on links rather than nodes, which allows them to demonstrate that overlapping communities and network hierarchies are two faces of the same issue.

    • Yong-Yeol Ahn
    • , James P. Bagrow
    •  & Sune Lehmann

  • Letter |

    UCYN–A is a recently discovered nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium with unusual metabolic features. The complete genome of this uncultivated organism is now presented, revealing a photofermentative metabolism and dependency on other organisms for essential compounds.

    • H. James Tripp
    • , Shellie R. Bench
    •  & Jonathan P. Zehr

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