(12/05/18) A Hard Days Night - review in Trends in Micro out!

A long awaited review article is finally finished and live online today! This was a truly collaborative effort between myself, Ben Rubin, Spencer Diamond, Rachel Hood, David Savage, and Susan Golden.

This effort was really started by Spencer Diamond as a postdoc in the Golden lab. When I arrived, Ben Rubin and I took it on and saw it through with the help of the rest of the gang.

Its a culmination of recents disoveries, with Ben’s RB-TnSeq library allowing us to determine not only essential genes in Synechococcus but also what genes contribute to fitness in light-dark cycles, Spencers work illucidating the role of the clock in carbon partitioning in light-dark cycles and the importance of transcription factors in regulating impotant night-time metabolic activities, and Rachel and Ben’s work on signaling nucleotides like cyclic-di-AMP and ppGpp. With these revealations, a paradigm shift in our thinking about cyanobacterial life in the dark.

In the paper, we discuss ways cyanobacteria integrate signals from both the environment and from an internal circadian clock to orchestrate diurnal physiology. Elaborate on how large datasets from genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic analyses have really opened up our eyes to daytime and night-time programs that cyanobacterial cells employ during diurnal growth. And go into what we learned from massive mutant screens about what aspects of metabolism is critical in the dark – such as the production of NADPH by the oxidative pentose phosphate pathway when photosynthesis is inactive – that ultimately drives the suppression of potentially lethal reactive oxygen species.

In all - a improved understanding of diurnal physiology in cyanobacteria may help to harness these organisms for biotechnology applications, where outdoor growth may be desirable and so I’m really happy with this finally being out. Enjoy!