Type: compound (carbon source)
Gluconate appears in this corpus as a carbon source. One project tracks its utilization pathway in Pseudomonas aeruginosa genomes from the lung, and another records gaps in gluconate utilization across fitness-profiled organisms 1,2.
Reduced predicted utilization in lung Pseudomonas aeruginosa genomes
The cystic fibrosis formulation-design comparison reports “PA lung metabolic streamlining”, in which lung pseudomonas-aeruginosa genomes show reduced predicted sugar-utilization pathway scores for sorbitol, mannitol and gluconate, while amino acid catabolic pathways remain comparatively conserved — the same project reports amino acid pathways as “97.4% conserved across 1,796 lung PA genomes” and “CF vs non-CF PA show zero amino acid pathway differences” 1. These are pathway-completeness predictions from genome comparison rather than measured loss of growth on gluconate, so neither complete pathway loss nor absolute invariance of amino acid catabolism is established by them 1. The report presents the pattern as confirming that competitive-exclusion targets are evolutionarily stable; because that durability is inferred from pathway scores rather than measured, it is best stated as the hypothesis that amino-acid-based exclusion targets stay more durable than sugar-based ones as lung strains evolve 1. See competitive-exclusion-consortium-design.
Gluconate-utilization gaps in functional dark matter
The functional dark-matter analysis lists gluconate utilization as a carbon-category gap present in 26 organisms, with marinobacter and D. desulfuricans given as examples 2. See experimental-prioritization-of-functional-dark-matter.
Related pages
- Rational Design of Protective Microbiome Formulations for Competitive Exclusion of *Pseudomonas aeruginosa* in Cystic Fibrosis Airways — lung PA pathway comparison 1
- Functional Dark Matter — Experimentally Prioritized Novel Genetic Systems — gluconate-utilization gap counts 2
- sorbitol — co-reported sugar-utilization pathway in lung PA genomes 1