1bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/043349; this version posted March 11, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. 1 Nature lessons: the whitefly bacterial endosymbiont is a minimal amino acid factory 2 with unusual energetics 3 4 Jorge Calle-Espinosa1, Miguel Ponce-de-Leon1, Diego Santos-Garcia2,3, Francisco J. Silva2,4, 5 Francisco Montero1* & Juli Peretó2,5* 6 *Corresponding authors: Francisco Montero
[email protected] - Juli Peretó 7
[email protected] 8 1 Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular I, Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, 9 Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid 28045, Spain. 10 2 Institut Cavanilles de Biodiversitat i Biologia Evolutiva, Universitat de València, C/José 11 Beltrán 2, Paterna 46980, Spain. 12 3 Present address: Department of Entomology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. 13 4 Departament de Genètica, Universitat de València. 14 5 Departament de Bioquímica i Biologia Molecular, Universitat de València. 15 16 Abstract 17 18 Bacterial lineages that establish obligate symbiotic associations with insect hosts are 19 known to possess highly reduced genomes with streamlined metabolic functions that are 20 commonly focused on amino acid and vitamin synthesis. We constructed a genome-scale 21 metabolic model of the whitefly bacterial endosymbiont Candidatus Portiera aleyrodidarum 22 to study the energy production capabilities using stoichiometric analysis. Strikingly, the 23 results suggest that the energetic metabolism of the bacterial endosymbiont relies on the use 24 of pathways related to the synthesis of amino acids and carotenoids.