Title: Tight coupling of metabolic oscillations and intracellular water dynamics in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Abstract: We detected very strong coupling between the oscillating
concentration of ATP and the dynamics of intracellular water during
glycolysis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Our results indicate that: i)
dipolar relaxation of intracellular water is heterogeneous within the cell
and different from dilute conditions, ii) water dipolar relaxation
oscillates with glycolysis and in phase with ATP concentration, iii) this
phenomenon is scale-invariant from the subcellular to the ensemble of
synchronized cells and, iv) the periodicity of both glycolytic
oscillations and dipolar relaxation are equally affected by D2O in a
dose-dependent manner. These results offer a new insight into the coupling
of an emergent intensive physicochemical property of the cell, i.e.
cell-wide water dipolar relaxation, and a central metabolite (ATP)
produced by a robustly oscillating metabolic process.