Abstact

Carbon dioxide is an omnipresent gas that drives adaptive responses within organisms from all domains of life. The molecular mechanisms by which proteins serve as sensors of CO2 are, accordingly, of great interest. Because CO2 is electrophilic, one way it can modulate protein biochemistry is by carboxylation of the amine group of lysine residues. However, the resulting CO2-carboxylated lysines spontaneously decompose, giving off CO2, which makes studying this modification difficult. Here we describe a method to stably mimic CO2-carboxylated lysine residues in proteins. We leverage this method to develop a quantitative approach to identify CO2-carboxylated lysines of proteins and explore the lysine 'carboxylome' of the CO2-responsive cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. We uncover one CO2-carboxylated lysine within the effector binding pocket of the metabolic signaling protein PII. CO2-carboxylatation of this lysine markedly lowers the affinity of PII for its regulatory effector ligand ATP, illuminating a negative molecular control mechanism mediated by CO2.