A peer-reviewed article of this preprint also exists.
Abstract
Carbonic anhydrases (CAs) are metalloenzymes that are omnipresent in nature. The CAs catalyze the basic reaction of reversible hydration of CO2 to HCO3− and H+ in all living organisms. Photosynthetic organisms contain six evolutionarily different classes of CAs, namely, α-CAs, β-CAs, γ-CAs, δ-CAs, ζ-CAs, and θ-CAs. Many of the photosynthetic organisms contain multiple isoforms of each CA family. Model alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii contains fifteen CAs belonging to three different CA gene families. Out of the fifteen CAs, three belong to α-CA gene family, nine to β-CA gene family, and three are γ-CAs. The multiple copies of the CAs in each gene family may be due to gene duplications within the particular CA gene family. The CAs of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii are localized in different subcellular compartments of this unicellular alga. The presence of a large number of CAs and their diverse subcellular localization within a single cell suggests the importance of these enzymes in metabolic and biochemical roles they perform in this unicellular alga. In the present review, we update the information on molecular biology of all the fifteen CAs and their metabolic and biochemical roles in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We also present a hypothetical model showing the known functions of CAs and predicting the functions of CAs for which precise metabolic roles are yet to be discovered.
Keywords:
Subject:
Biology and Life Sciences - Anatomy and Physiology
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
Alerts
Preprints.org is a free preprint server supported by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.