Section: New Results

Metabolic network comparison

All living organisms have very similar metabolic needs as they all uptake nutrients from their environment, degrade them into basic building blocks such as amino acids and nucleotides, which in turn are essential input for protein and DNA synthesis. A natural expectation is therefore that they share an even reduced core of metabolic functions necessary to carry out this basic small molecule metabolism. Comparing the small molecule metabolism of 58 bacteria carefully selected and representing a range of lifestyles, we found not a single enzymatic reaction common to all of them. This absence of a metabolic core is essentially due to intracellular symbionts. These results were in preparation in 2010 and are now submitted. The work was done in a collaboration with Ludovic Cottret (INSA Toulouse) and Ana Tereza Vasconcelos.