The energy charge in wild-type and respiration-deficient Chinese hamster cell mutants

High pressure liquid chromatography was used to determine the base, nucleoside, and nucleotide levels in wild type and a series of respiration-deficient Chinese hamster cell mutants. From this analysis the size of the total adenylate pool and the energy charge could be calculated for each cell line. We find a constant energy charge, as expected, but the adenylate pool seems to be considerably lower in the respiration-deficient mutants.