Urea Amidolyase as an Enzyme for Urea Utilisation in Phytoplankton: Functional Display in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

Urea is an important source of nitrogen for many phytoplankton with the potential to stimulate harmful algal blooms, but the molecular machinery underpinning urea uptake and assimilation by algae is not fully understood. Urease (URE) is commonly regarded as the responsible enzyme, but urea amidolyase (UAL), albeit known to exist, has hardly been studied. Here, the species distribution, expression patterns and functional roles of UAL are examined. We found a widespread occurrence of UAL across six major phytoplankton lineages, along with evidence of a potential URE-independent evolutionary trajectory and lineage-specific losses. Quantitative analyses based on marine planktonic metagenomes and metatranscriptomes revealed that UAL is as prevalent as URE, but exhibits higher expression levels in phytoplankton than in bacteria, suggesting that UAL plays a crucial role in nitrogen nutrition in marine phytoplankton. Furthermore, using the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing method and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as the algal model, we showed that DUR2 in UAL is essential for urea utilisation, as its knockout completely abolishes the ability of algae to grow under urea as the sole nitrogen source. This study unveils an unappreciated mechanism in algae for utilising urea as a nutrient, underscores the need to consider both URE and UAL enzyme systems to model urea utilisation by algae and provides a crucial gene (DUR2) as a potential genetic marker for detecting the contribution of UAL to urea utilisation in phytoplankton.