ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2008
The photorespiratory glycolate metabolism is essential for cyanobacteria and might have been conveyed endosymbiontically to plants.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 127 papers.
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Who cites it
127 citing papers in PubMed, 316 citations in OpenAlex.
- The mosaic of aquatic photorespiration: evolution, diversity, and global biogeochemical impacts.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Terpene-based biofuels production: a revolutionizing role of cyanobacteria through metabolic engineering, opportunities and challenges.Archives of microbiology · 2026Review
- From pond to platform: howJournal of bacteriology · 2026Review
- Photorespiration benefits.Nature plants · 2026Article
- From photosynthetic electron flow to gene regulation: redox signal transduction in cyanobacteria.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Move over endosymbionts, peroxisomes pass electrons too.Biochemical Society transactions · 2025Review
- Ecosystem relocation on Snowball Earth: Polar-alpine ancestry of the extant surface biosphere?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Inorganic Carbon Acquisition and Photosynthetic Metabolism in Marine Photoautotrophs: A Summary.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Efficient Multiplex Genome Editing of the Cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 via CRISPR-Cas12a.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2025Article
- The regulatory impact of serine/threonine-specific protein phosphorylation among cyanobacteria.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Review
- Atomic view of photosynthetic metabolite permeability pathways and confinement in synthetic carboxysome shells.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evidence of a putative COEnvironmental microbiology reports · 2024Article
- Removal of phosphoglycolate in hyperthermophilic archaea.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Multiple Roles of Glycerate Kinase-From Photorespiration to Gluconeogenesis, CInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- The primary carbon metabolism in cyanobacteria and its regulation.Frontiers in plant science · 2024Review
- Using Publicly Available RNA-seq Data for Expression Analysis of Genes of Interest.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2024Article
- Article
- Isotopic Signatures of Carbon Transfer in a Proterozoic Analogue Microbial Mat.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2023Article
- Protection of nitrogenase from photosynthetic OPhotosynthetica · 2023Review
- Core metabolism plasticity in phytoplankton: Response of Dunaliella tertiolecta to oil exposure.Journal of phycology · 2022Article
67 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Photorespiratory 2-phosphoglycolate (2PG) metabolism is essential for photosynthesis in higher plants but thought to be superfluous in cyanobacteria because of their ability to concentrate CO(2) internally and thereby inhibit photorespiration. Here, we show that 3 routes for 2PG metabolism are present in the model cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. strain PCC 6803. In addition to the photorespiratory C2 cycle characterized in plants, this cyanobacterium also possesses the bacterial glycerate pathway and is able to completely decarboxylate glyoxylate via oxalate. A triple mutant with defects in all 3 routes of 2PG metabolism exhibited a high-CO(2)-requiring (HCR) phenotype. All these catabolic routes start with glyoxylate, which can be synthesized by 2 different forms of glycolate dehydrogenase (GlcD). Mutants defective in one or both GlcD proteins accumulated glycolate under high CO(2) level and the double mutant DeltaglcD1/DeltaglcD2 was unable to grow under low CO(2). The HCR phenotype of both the double and the triple mutant could not be attributed to a significantly reduced affinity to CO(2), such as in other cyanobacterial HCR mutants defective in the CO(2)-concentrating mechanism (CCM). These unexpected findings of an HCR phenotype in the presence of an active CCM indicate that 2PG metabolism is essential for the viability of all organisms that perform oxygenic photosynthesis, including cyanobacteria and C3 plants, at ambient CO(2) conditions. These data and phylogenetic analyses suggest cyanobacteria as the evolutionary origin not only of oxygenic photosynthesis but also of an ancient photorespiratory 2PG metabolism.
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