Glycogen and starch are the major carbon and energy reserve polysaccharides in nature, providing living organisms with a survival advantage. The evolution of the enzymatic machinery responsible for the biosynthesis and degradation of such polysaccharides, led the development of mechanisms to control the assembly and disassembly rate, to store and recover glucose according to cell energy demands. The tetrameric enzyme ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (AGPase) catalyzes and regulates the initial step in the biosynthesis of both α-polyglucans. AGPase displays cooperativity and allosteric regulation by sensing metabolites from the cell energy flux. The understanding of the allosteric signal transduction mechanisms in AGPase arises as a long-standing challenge. In this work, we disclose the cryoEM structures of the paradigmatic homotetrameric AGPase from Escherichia coli (EcAGPase), in complex with either positive or negative physiological allosteric regulators, fructose-1,6-bisphosphate (FBP) and AMP respectively, both at 3.0 Å resolution. Strikingly, the structures reveal that FBP binds deeply into the allosteric cleft and overlaps the AMP site. As a consequence, FBP promotes a concerted conformational switch of a regulatory loop, RL2, from a \"locked\" to a \"free\" state, modulating ATP binding and activating the enzyme. This notion is strongly supported by our complementary biophysical and bioinformatics evidence, and a careful analysis of vast enzyme kinetics data on single-point mutants of EcAGPase. The cryoEM structures uncover the residue interaction networks (RIN) between the allosteric and the catalytic components of the enzyme, providing unique details on how the signaling information is transmitted across the tetramer, from which cooperativity emerges. Altogether, the conformational states visualized by cryoEM reveal the regulatory mechanism of EcAGPase, laying the foundations to understand the allosteric control of bacterial glycogen biosynthesis at the molecular level of detail.

Lactococcus lactis can undergo respiration when hemin is added to an aerobic culture. The most distinctive feature of lactococcal respiration is that lactate could be consumed in the stationary phase concomitantly with the rapid accumulation of diacetyl and acetoin. However, the enzyme responsible for lactate utilization in this process has not yet been identified. As genes for fermentative NAD-dependent l-lactate dehydrogenase (l-nLDH) and potential electron transport chain (ETC)-related NAD-independent l-LDH (l-iLDH) exist in L. lactis, the activities of these enzymes were measured in this study using crude cell extracts prepared from respiratory and fermentation cultures. Further studies were conducted with purified preparations of recombinant LDH homologous proteins. The results showed that l-iLDH activity was hardly detected in both crude cell extracts and purified l-iLDH homologous protein while l-nLDH activity was very significant. This suggested that l-iLDHs were inactive in lactate utilization. The results of kinetic analyses and the effects of activator, inhibitor, substrate and product concentrations on the reaction equilibrium showed that l-nLDH was much more prone to catalyze the pyruvate reduction reaction but could reverse its role provided that the concentrations of NADH and pyruvate were extremely low while NAD and lactate were abundant. Metabolite analysis in respiratory culture revealed that the cellular status in the stationary phase was beneficial for l-nLDH to catalyze lactate oxidation. The factors accounting for the respiration- and stationary phase-dependent lactate utilization in L. lactis are discussed here.