Balancing cost and benefit: How E. coli cleverly averts disulfide stress caused by cystine

Building a robust, stable network must include strategies to minimize perturbations caused by environmental stress, while optimizing cellular fitness. The introduction of oxygen into the Earth's atmosphere brought challenges for the microbes that had evolved enzyme machinery and metabolic network stability in the anoxic world. Unable to generate new enzyme paradigms and metabolic networks de novo, organisms have evolved strategies to neutralize the impact of oxygen that can be added to and integrated into the existing metabolic framework. This issue of Molecular Microbiology includes a paper by Korshunov et al. in which the authors describe an elegant strategy that Escherichia coli has evolved to minimize metabolic stress that results from the acquisition and use of cystine, the oxidized form of cysteine, as a source of cellular sulfur. This study highlights how a strategy involving both cost and benefit can result in a functional, but energy intensive mechanism for this bacterium to thrive in an oxic world.