Once you ask the question: What is life?, as the Viennese physicist Erwin Schrödinger, there is one central answer: energy uptake and consumption. This process maintains life processes and without the organism will die. Only recently, biologists are able to compare these processes in various organisms and start to get a picture how energy uptake and consumption are regulated. Based on these discoveries it becomes clear that there are highly conserved molecular building blocks in all higher organisms from plants, fungi, animals to human. Most importantly there are two major antagonistic protein kinases AMPK and TOR which can be found in all eukaryotic cells and which are able to sense the cellular energy status.

Recently, a team around the systems biologist Wolfram Weckwerth revealed another mechanism in plants which comprises the antagonistic cross talk of AMPK and TOR with respect to the regulation of protein translation and seems to be highly conserved from animals to plants [1]. Protein translation is a highly energy demanding process and needs to be tightly regulated during cellular growth. The study reveals also that molecular evolution relies on similar molecular mechanisms to regulate this crucial process of energy uptake and consumption from plants to human [2].

Publications

1. Nukarinen E, Nagele T, Pedrotti L, Wurzinger B, Mair A, Landgraf R, Bornke F, Hanson J, Teige M, Baena-Gonzalez E, Droge-Laser W, & Weckwerth W (2016) Quantitative phosphoproteomics reveals the role of the AMPK plant ortholog SnRK1 as a metabolic master regulator under energy deprivation. Scientific reports 6:31697.
2. Roustan V, Jain A, Teige M, Ebersberger I, & Weckwerth W (2016) An evolutionary perspective of AMPK-TOR signaling in the three domains of life. J Exp Bot 67(13):3897-3907.