Characterization of Bacterial Arginine Kinases in Species from the Order Myxococcales

Abstract

Phosphagen kinases are found in many eukaryotes and function in energy buffering within the cell through the exchange of a phosphate group between ATP and one of eight substrates (Ellington, 2001). Arginine kinases (AKs) have been identified in a few bacteria and phylogenetic analysis suggest they arrived through horizontal gene transfer (Andrews et al., 2008; Bragg et al., 2012; Suzuki et al., 2013). Recently, the bacterial AK in the well‐studied soil bacteria, Myxococcus xanthus, was knocked out and the deletion strain characterized. The results were impairment in both recovery from some forms of stress and completing a starvation induced development pathway that leads to spore formation. To update our understanding of the bacterial AKs, we conducted a BLAST search of bacterial genomes and found a total of 37 bacterial species with AKs. The majority of the bacterial AKs were deltaproteobacteria (20) with 5 in the genus Myxococcus. Interestingly, the AKs seen in the Myxococcus species seems to have arrived through two independent HGT events and thus present an opportunity to better understand how two similar evolutionary events (HGT of an AK into a soil bacterial genome) have subsequently evolved. Will the outcomes be the same or different? We will describe the biochemistry and phylogenetics of the AKs found within the deltaproteobacteria order Myxococcales.Support or Funding InformationFunding provided through 2014 NSF‐PGRP 1444539 and the Whitmore‐Williams Science Scholarship at the College of Wooster.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.