Yeast mitochondrial metabolism: from in vitro to in situ quantitative study

In this work, we first compared yeast mitochondrial oxidative metabolism at different levels of organization: whole cells (C), spheroplasts (S), permeabilized spheroplasts (PS) or isolated mitochondria (M). At present, S are more suitable for use than C for biochemical techniques such as fast extraction of metabolites and permeabilization. We show here that respiratory rates of S with various substrates are similar to C, which demonstrate that they are adapted to yeast bioenergetic studies. It appeared from ethanol metabolism +/- NAD+ or NADH respiratory rates on PS that ethanol metabolism was largely cytosolic; moreover, the activity of NADH dehydrogenase was lesser in the case of PS than in S. By comparing PS and M, the biggest difference concerned the respiratory rates of pyruvate and pyruvate-malate, which were much lower for M. Thus mitochondria preparation caused an unidentified loss involved directly in pyruvate metabolism. When the respiratory rate was lowered as a consequence of a high kinetic control of oxidative activity upstream from the respiratory chain, a similar correlation between the increase in ATP/O and decrease in respiratory rate was observed. So, the intrinsic uncoupling of proton pumps is not a particularity of M. Secondly, we demonstrate the existence of a mechanism of retarded diffusion in yeast similar to that already observed in permeabilized mammalian cells for ADP. Such a mechanism also occurs in yeast for several respiratory substrates: the K0.5 for each substrate toward the respiration rate in PS always exceeds that for M. It is proposed that such a discrepancy is due to a restriction of metabolite movement across the outer mitochondrial membrane in permeabilized cells, i.e. regulation of the substrate permeability through porin channels. In the porin-deficient yeast mutant, the K0.5 for NADH is not significantly different in either M or PS and is comparable to that of the parent strain PS. This result confirms that this retarded diffusion is essentially due to the opening-closing of the porin channel.