Metabolism articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    The oxidation of formate and water to bicarbonate and H2 is relatively common in microorganisms under anaerobic conditions. But can this reaction sustain growth in an isolated species? Here it is shown that several individual Thermococcus species can use formate oxidation for growth. Moreover, the biochemical basis of this ability is delineated.

    • Yun Jae Kim
    • , Hyun Sook Lee
    •  & Sung Gyun Kang

  • Letter |

    B cells are activated by many different antigens to produce appropriate antibodies. B cells express up to 120,000 B-cell antigen receptor (BCR) complexes on their surface, but how do these complexes remain silent on resting B cells, and how are they activated? It is found here that the BCR on resting cells forms oligomers, and that these may be an autoinhibited form of the receptor. Disruption of the oligomer shifts B cells towards activation.

    • Jianying Yang
    •  & Michael Reth

  • 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

  • Article |

    A non-coding polymorphism at a locus associated with myocardial infarction in humans creates a CCAAT/enhancer binding protein transcription factor binding site and alters the hepatic expression of the SORT1 gene. These authors show that modulating Sort1 levels in mouse liver alters levels of plasma low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and very low-density lipoprotein, potentially explaining why polymorphisms at this locus are associated with heart disease.

    • Kiran Musunuru
    • , Alanna Strong
    •  & Daniel J. Rader

  • Article |

    Lipid concentration in the serum is one of the most important risk factors for coronary artery disease and can be targeted for therapeutic intervention. A genome-wide association study in >100,000 individuals of European ancestry now finds 95 significantly associated loci that also affect lipid traits in non-European populations. Among associated loci are those involved in cholesterol metabolism, known targets of cholesterol-lowering drugs and those that contribute to normal variation in lipid traits and to extreme lipid phenotypes.

    • Tanya M. Teslovich
    • , Kiran Musunuru
    •  & Sekar Kathiresan

  • News & Views |

    One of the hallmarks of cellular biochemistry is the ability to extract energy efficiently from available substrates. The malaria parasite, however, deviates from the norm, and has come up with its own solution.

    • Hagai Ginsburg

  • News & Views |

    The daily light–dark cycle affects many aspects of normal physiology through the activity of circadian clocks. It emerges that the pancreas has a clock of its own, which responds to energy fluctuations.

    • Katja A. Lamia
    •  & Ronald M. Evans

  • Letter |

    Modern sperm whales have relatively small teeth and feed by suction, but the discovery of large teeth in the fossil record suggests that raptorial sperm whales once existed. Here the authors report the discovery of the teeth and jaws of a fossil raptorial sperm whale from the Middle Miocene of Peru, almost as large as a modern sperm whale but with a three-metre head and jaws full of teeth, some 36cm long.

    • Olivier Lambert
    • , Giovanni Bianucci
    •  & Jelle Reumer

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Julia Fischer
    • , Linda Koch
    •  & Ulrich Rüther

  • Letter |

    It has been thought that the basal metabolic rate of organisms increases as body mass is raised to some power, p. But the value of p has proved controversial, with both 2/3 and 3/4 being proposed. It is found here that the relationship between mass and metabolic rate does not follow a pure power law at all, and requires a quadratic term to account for curvature. Taking temperature and phylogeny into account, this explains why different data sets have produced different exponents when a power law has been fitted.

    • Tom Kolokotrones
    • , Van Savage
    •  & Walter Fontana

  • News & Views |

    Why metabolic rates do not vary in direct proportion to body mass has long been the subject of debate. Progress has been made with the realization that no universal scaling exponent can be applied to them.

    • Craig R. White

  • Letter |

    Thermophilic bacteria and archaea use carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide as a starting material for making the organic substances used in cellular molecules. A central enzyme in this pathway has now been discovered, namely fructose 1,6-bisphosphate aldolase/phosphatase. This enzyme might represent the ancestral gluconeogenic enzyme.

    • Rafael F. Say
    •  & Georg Fuchs

  • Article |

    In certain microbes, the anaerobic oxidation of methane can be linked to the reduction of nitrates and nitrites. Here it is shown that this occurs through the intermediate production of oxygen. This brings the number of known biological pathways for oxygen production to four, with implications for our understanding of life on the early Earth.

    • Katharina F. Ettwig
    • , Margaret K. Butler
    •  & Marc Strous

  • News & Views |

    Microorganisms that grow by oxidizing methane come in two basic types, aerobic and anaerobic. Now we have something in between that generates its own supply of molecular oxygen by metabolizing nitric oxide.

    • Ronald S. Oremland

  • Letter |

    During fasting SIRT3 is induced in liver and brown adipose tissue. One of SIRT3's substrates is shown to be long–chain acyl co-enzyme A dehydrogenase (LCAD). Without SIRT3 LCAD becomes hyperacetylated, which diminishes its activity, and reduces fatty acid oxidation. Mice without SIRT3 have all the hallmarks of fatty acid oxidation disorders during fasting, including reduced ATP levels and intolerance to cold. Thus, acetylation is a novel regulatory mechanism for fatty acid oxidation.

    • Matthew D. Hirschey
    • , Tadahiro Shimazu
    •  & Eric Verdin

  • Article |

    Mutations near the ORMDL3 gene have been associated with childhood asthma. Here, in yeast, Orm proteins are shown to function in sphingolipid homeostasis; alterations in this control result in misregulation of sphingolipid production and accumulation of toxic metabolites. This raises the testable hypothesis that misregulation of sphingolipids may directly contribute to the development of asthma.

    • David K. Breslow
    • , Sean R. Collins
    •  & Jonathan S. Weissman

  • News & Views |

    Although sphingolipids are vital cellular components, the path to their production is paved with toxic intermediates. Orm proteins allow cells to form these lipids without killing themselves in the process.

    • Fikadu G. Tafesse
    •  & Joost C. M. Holthuis

  • Article |

    Pancreatic β-cells release insulin, which controls energy homeostasis in vertebrates, and its lack causes diabetes mellitus. The transcription factor neurogenin 3 (Neurog3) initiates differentiation of β-cells and other islet cell types from pancreatic endoderm; here, the transcription factor Rfx6 is shown to direct islet cell differentiation downstream of Neurog3 in mice and humans. This may be useful in efforts to generate β-cells for patients with diabetes.

    • Stuart B. Smith
    • , Hui-Qi Qu
    •  & Michael S. German

  • Letter |

    Heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) is a molecular chaperone which, by inhibiting lysosomal membrane permeabilization, promotes the survival of stressed cells. Hsp70 is now shown to stabilize lysosomes by binding to an anionic phospholipid, BMP, resulting in stimulation of acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) activity. Notably, the decreased ASM activity and lysosomal stability seen in patients with Niemann–Pick disease can be corrected by treatment with recombinant Hsp70.

    • Thomas Kirkegaard
    • , Anke G. Roth
    •  & Marja Jäättelä

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