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trimethylamine N-oxide respiration

traitmech:000199 · CLASS · PROPOSED

An anaerobic respiration in which an organism uses trimethylamine N-oxide as the terminal electron acceptor and reduces it to trimethylamine for energy conservation.

Trait evidence (3)

  • DOI:10.1111/1462-2920.12726
    anaerobic respiratory growth with trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO) as the terminal electron acceptor

    Denby et al. support TMAO as the organism-level terminal electron acceptor for anaerobic respiratory growth.

  • DOI:10.1111/1462-2920.12726
    TMAO is reduced to TMA by the enzyme TMAO reductase, encoded by the torCAD operon

    Denby et al. describe reduction of trimethylamine N-oxide to trimethylamine by the TorCAD-linked TMAO reductase.

  • DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2024.1467153
    switching from aerobic intracellular energy metabolism to trimethylamine N-oxide respiration

    Qiu and Tang use the unabbreviated respiration label while linking high-pressure survival in Shewanella eurypsychrophilus YLB-09 to TMAO respiration.

Provenance

Identifier source
TraitMech local identifier
Definition source
DOI:10.1111/1462-2920.12726

Parent traits (1)

Synonyms (1)

  • TMAO respiration EXACT_SYNONYM · DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2024.1467153

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

  • Escherichia coli K-12 NCBITaxon:83333 DOI:10.1111/1462-2920.12726 Denby et al. characterized E. coli K-12 MG1655 adaptation from anaerobic fermentative growth to a TMAO-respiratory/fermentative steady state after TMAO addition.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Resolve an exact external ontology class for organism-level trimethylamine N-oxide respiration before adding a TraitRecord xref.

CURATION TODO OPEN trimethylamine-n-oxide-respiration-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-09-15

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

The pinned METPO snapshot has no active organism-level class for trimethylamine N-oxide respiration. Candidate EC, Rhea, and protein-family terms for TorA or broader trimethylamine N-oxide reductases are narrower than the whole-organism anaerobic respiration phenotype.

Curation history

  1. · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex

    Minted trimethylamine N-oxide respiration as a DOI-backed anaerobic respiration TraitRecord with an exact TMAO respiration synonym after a repository-wide duplicate review covering ignored and hidden files; the local METPO snapshot has no exact class and the replacement placeholder is reserved in proposals/metpo_traitmech_v76.