PNNL

Abstract

Cyanobacteria, the only prokaryotes capable of oxygenic photosynthesis, are present in diverse ecological niches and play crucial roles in global carbon and nitrogen cycles. To proliferate in nature, cyanobacteria utilize a host of stress responses to accommodate periodic changes in environmental conditions. A detailed knowledge of the composition of, as well as the dynamic changes in, the proteome is necessary to gain fundamental insights into such stress responses. Toward this goal, we have performed a largescale proteomic analysis of the widely studied model cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 under 33 different environmental conditions. The resulting high-quality dataset consists of 22,318 unique peptides corresponding to 1,955 proteins, a coverage of 53% of the predicted proteome. Quantitative determination of protein abundances has led to the identification of 1,198 differentially regulated proteins. Notably, our analysis revealed that a common stress response under various environmental perturbations, irrespective of amplitude and duration, is the activation of atypical pathways for the acquisition of carbon and nitrogen from urea and arginine. In particular, arginine is catabolized via putrescine to produce succinate and glutamate, sources of carbon and nitrogen, respectively. This study provides the most comprehensive functional and quantitative analysis of the Synechocystis proteome to date, and shows that a significant stress response of cyanobacteria involves an uncommon mode of acquisition of carbon and nitrogen. Oxygenic phototrophic prokaryotes, the progenitors of the chloroplast, are crucial to global oxygen production and worldwide carbon and nitrogen cycles. These microalgae are robust organisms capable carbon neutral biofuel production. Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 has historically been a model cyanobacterium for photosynthetic research and is emerging as a promising biofuel platform. Cellular responses are severely modified by environmental conditions, such as temperature and nutrient availability. However the global protein responses of Synechocystis 6803 under physiological relevant environmental stresses have not been characterized. Here we present the first global proteome analysis of a photoautotrophic bacteria and the most complete coverage to date of a photosynthetic prokaryotic proteome. To obtain a more complete description of the protein components of Synechocystis 6803, we have performed an in-depth proteome analysis of this organism utilizing the Accurate Mass and Time (AMT) tag approach1 utilizing 33 growth conditions and timepoints. The resulting proteome consists of 22,318 unique peptides, corresponding to 2,369 unique proteins, covering 65% of the predicted proteins. Quantitative analysis of protein abundance ratios under nutrient stress revealed that Synechocystis 6803 resorts to a universal mechanism for nitrogen utilization under phosphate, sulfate, iron, and nitrogen depletion. Comparison of this proteomic data with previously published microarray studies under similar environmental conditions showed that the general response predicted by both types of analyses are common but that the actual levels of protein expression can not be inferred from gene expression data. Our results demonstrate a global nitrogen response to multiple stressors that may be similar to that used by other cyanobacteria under various stress conditions. We anticipate that this protein expression data will be a foundation for the photosynthetic and biofuel communities to better understand metabolic changes under physiological conditions relevant to global productivity. Further more, this comparison of correlation between gene and protein expression data provides deeper insight into the ongoing debate as to whether gene expression can be used to infer cellular response.