Metabolic Robustness to Growth Temperature of a Cold- Adapted Marine Bacterium
Christopher Riccardi, Marzia Calvanese, Veronica Ghini, Tania Alonso-Vásquez, Elena Perrin, Paola Turano, Giorgio Giurato, Alessandro Weisz, Ermenegilda Parrilli, Maria Luisa Tutino, Marco Fondi
Abstract
This manuscript addresses a central and broad interest topic in environmental microbiology, i.e. the effect of growth temperature on microbial cell physiology. We investigated if and how metabolic homeostasis is maintained in a cold-adapted bacterium during growth at temperatures that differ widely and that match measured changes on the field. Our integrative approach revealed an extraordinary robustness of the central metabolome to growth temperature. However, this was counteracted by deep changes at the transcriptional level, and especially in the metabolic part of the transcriptome. This conflictual scenario was interpreted as a transcriptomic buffering of cellular metabolism, and was investigated using genome-scale metabolic modeling. Overall, our findings reveal a complex interplay at gene expression level that contributes to the robustness/resilience of core metabolism, also promoting the use of state-of-the-art multi-disciplinary approaches to fully comprehend molecular adaptations to environmental fluctuations.