Ubiquinone Biosynthesis over the Entire O <sub>2</sub> Range: Characterization of a Conserved O <sub>2</sub> -Independent Pathway
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In order to colonize environments with large O 2 gradients or fluctuating O 2 levels, bacteria have developed metabolic responses that remain incompletely understood. Such adaptations have been recently linked to antibiotic resistance, virulence, and the capacity to develop in complex ecosystems like the microbiota. Here, we identify a novel pathway for the biosynthesis of ubiquinone, a molecule with a key role in cellular bioenergetics. We link three uncharacterized genes of Escherichia coli to this pathway and show that the pathway functions independently from O 2 . In contrast, the long-described pathway for ubiquinone biosynthesis requires O 2 as a substrate. In fact, we find that many proteobacteria are equipped with the O 2 -dependent and O 2 -independent pathways, supporting that they are able to synthesize ubiquinone over the entire O 2 range. Overall, we propose that the novel O 2 -independent pathway is part of the metabolic plasticity developed by proteobacteria to face various environmental O 2 levels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".