Abstract
Metabolic pathways are mosaics of a limited set of metabolic modules and prototypic reactions. Mosaic pathways also include important metabolic variations of modules that confer a microbe’s distinctive physiology and ecology. The examples in this chapter are mostly of fermenting microbes as their metabolism and the metabolic interactions between them reveal well how thermodynamic, kinetic, and chemical constraints on a catabolic pathway (i) determine the fitness and niche of a microbe, (ii) drive speciation of metabolism into individual microbes, and (iii) cause metabolic interactions and community structure. The examples show also the basis of how and why metabolism shifts in individual microbes when acclimating to changing environmental conditions. The metabolism of the microbes discussed here helps to understandthe high flux-driven metabolic speciation as introduced by the Julian Adams experiment.
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Further Reading
Boll M et al (2016) Fermentative cyclohexane carboxylate formation in Syntrophus aciditrophicus. J Mol Microbiol Biotechnol 26:165–179
Buckel W, Thauer RK (2013) Energy conservation via electron bifurcating ferredoxin reduction and proton/Na(+) translocating ferredoxin oxidation. Biochim Biophys Acta 1827(2):94–113
Chadwick GL, Skennerton CT, Laso-Perez R, Leu AO, Speth DR, Yu H et al (2022) Comparative genomics reveals electron transfer and syntrophic mechanisms differentiating methanotrophic and methanogenic archaea. PLoS Biol 20(1):e3001508
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Wiechmann A et al (2020) It does not always take two to tango: “Syntrophy” via hydrogen cycling in one bacterial cell. ISME 14:1562–1570
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Spormann, A.M. (2023). Fermentative Metabolism. In: Principles of Microbial Metabolism and Metabolic Ecology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28218-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28218-8_9
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