Metabolic profiling of isolated mitochondria and cytoplasm reveals compartment-specific metabolic responses

Subcellular compartmentalization enables eukaryotic cells to carry out different reactions at the same time, resulting in different metabolite pools in the subcellular compartments. Thus, mutations affecting the mitochondrial energy metabolism could cause different metabolic alterations in mitochondria compared to the cytoplasm. Given that the metabolite pool in the cytosol is larger than that of other subcellular compartments, metabolic profiling of total cells could miss these compartment-specific metabolic alterations.

To reveal compartment-specific metabolic differences, mitochondria and the cytoplasmic fraction of baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae were isolated and subjected to metabolic profiling.

Mitochondria were isolated through differential centrifugation and were analyzed together with the remaining cytoplasm by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) based metabolic profiling.

Seventy-two metabolites were identified, of which eight were found exclusively in mitochondria and sixteen exclusively in the cytoplasm. Based on the metabolic signature of mitochondria and of the cytoplasm, mutants of the succinate dehydrogenase (respiratory chain complex II) and of the F_OF₁-ATP-synthase (complex V) can be discriminated in both compartments by principal component analysis from wild-type and each other. These mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation machinery mutants altered not only citric acid cycle related metabolites but also amino acids, fatty acids, purine and pyrimidine intermediates and others.

By applying metabolomics to isolated mitochondria and the corresponding cytoplasm, compartment-specific metabolic signatures can be identified. This subcellular metabolomics analysis is a powerful tool to study the molecular mechanism of compartment-specific metabolic homeostasis in response to mutations affecting the mitochondrial metabolism.