BioProject

Nitrogenase is the key enzyme involved in nitrogen fixation and uses low potential electrons delivered by ferredoxin or flavodoxin to reduce dinitrogen gas (N2) to produce ammonia and hydrogen. More...

Nitrogenase is the key enzyme involved in nitrogen fixation and uses low potential electrons delivered by ferredoxin or flavodoxin to reduce dinitrogen gas (N2) to produce ammonia and hydrogen. Although the phototrophic alphaproteobacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris encodes many proteins that can reduce ferredoxin, the electron bifurcating FixABCX complex is the only one shown to support nitrogen fixation. To gain insight into why R. palustris is unable to use these other enzymes to reduce ferredoxin in the absence of FixABCX, we isolated a suppressor of R. palustris DfixC that allowed this strain to grow under nitrogen-fixing conditions. We found two mutations were necessary and sufficient to restore growth under nitrogen-fixing conditions in the absence of a functional FixABCX. One mutation was in the primary ferredoxin involved in nitrogen fixation, fer1, and the other mutation was in rpa0678, a homolog of NAD+-dependent ferredoxin:NADPH oxidoreductase, which carries out flavin-based electron bifurcation to generate reduced Fd. We present evidence that Rpa0678 plays a role in electron transfer to benzoyl-CoA reductase, the key enzyme involved in anaerobic aromatic compound degradation. Together these findings indicate that the electron transfer pathway for anaerobic aromatic compound degradation was re-purposed to support nitrogen fixation in the suppressor strain. Overall design: Comparative gene expression profiling analysis of RNA-seq data for R. palustris CGA753 and suppressor mutant of CGA753 with a deletion in fixC Less...