ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
pH determines the energetic efficiency of the cyanobacterial CO2 concentrating mechanism.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 92 papers.
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92 citing papers in PubMed, 215 citations in OpenAlex.
- Photoautotrophic Production of 2-O-α-D-Glucosylglycerol by MarineMarine drugs · 2026Article
- From fundamental understanding to engineering of carboxysomes for biotechnological applications.Plant communications · 2026Review
- Experimental Evidence for a Metal-Related Function of a Cyanobactin.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Article
- Gas exchange measurements of carboxysome mutants reveal insights into cyanobacterial carbon-concentrating mechanisms.Plant physiology · 2026Article
- Carbon dioxide concentration alters cyanobacterial carboxysome encapsulation and redox state in Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Architectural and biochemical advances in understanding microbial COThe Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology · 2026Review
- Transfer of the synechan biosynthesis and regulatory pathway enables sulfated polysaccharide production in Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Using Cryogenic Electron Tomography (cryoET) to Determine Rubisco Polymerization Constants in α-Carboxysomes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Recent insights into α-carboxysome structure, mechanism, and assembly.Journal of bacteriology · 2026Review
- [COResearch square · 2026Article
- Article
- Boundaries of photosynthesis: adaptations of carbon fixation in extreme environments.FEBS open bio · 2025Review
- Understanding carboxysomes to enhance carbon fixation in crops.Biochemical Society transactions · 2025Review
- Quantitative Measurement of Molecular Permeability to a Synthetic Bacterial Microcompartment Shell System.ACS synthetic biology · 2025Article
- Dual carbon sequestration with photosynthetic living materials.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Discussion of the possibility of increasing the efficiency of photosynthesis using genetic and metabolic engineering methods.Biodesign research · 2025Review
- Modeling with uncertainty quantification reveals the essentials of a non-canonical algal carbon-concentrating mechanism.Plant physiology · 2025Article
- 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
- The Freshwater CyanobacteriumPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- A systematic exploration of bacterial form I rubisco maximal carboxylation rates.The EMBO journal · 2024Article
32 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many carbon-fixing bacteria rely on a CO2 concentrating mechanism (CCM) to elevate the CO2 concentration around the carboxylating enzyme ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO). The CCM is postulated to simultaneously enhance the rate of carboxylation and minimize oxygenation, a competitive reaction with O2 also catalyzed by RuBisCO. To achieve this effect, the CCM combines two features: active transport of inorganic carbon into the cell and colocalization of carbonic anhydrase and RuBisCO inside proteinaceous microcompartments called carboxysomes. Understanding the significance of the various CCM components requires reconciling biochemical intuition with a quantitative description of the system. To this end, we have developed a mathematical model of the CCM to analyze its energetic costs and the inherent intertwining of physiology and pH. We find that intracellular pH greatly affects the cost of inorganic carbon accumulation. At low pH the inorganic carbon pool contains more of the highly cell-permeable H2CO3, necessitating a substantial expenditure of energy on transport to maintain internal inorganic carbon levels. An intracellular pH ≈8 reduces leakage, making the CCM significantly more energetically efficient. This pH prediction coincides well with our measurement of intracellular pH in a model cyanobacterium. We also demonstrate that CO2 retention in the carboxysome is necessary, whereas selective uptake of HCO3 (-) into the carboxysome would not appreciably enhance energetic efficiency. Altogether, integration of pH produces a model that is quantitatively consistent with cyanobacterial physiology, emphasizing that pH cannot be neglected when describing biological systems interacting with inorganic carbon pools.
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