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ornithine decarboxylase activity

traitmech:000154 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A physiological enzyme-activity phenotype in which a cell produces active ornithine decarboxylase enzymes that decarboxylate L-ornithine to putrescine and carbon dioxide.

Trait evidence (2)

  • https://iubmb.qmul.ac.uk/enzyme/EC4/1/1/17.html
    Reaction: L-ornithine = putrescine + CO2

    The NC-IUBMB EC 4.1.1.17 entry defines ornithine decarboxylase by its accepted name and reaction from L-ornithine to putrescine and CO2, grounding the enzyme activity named by the organism-level phenotype.

  • DOI:10.1128/jb.124.2.791-799.1975
    Several Escherichia coli K-12 mutants blocked in the synthesis of ornithine decarboxylase (OD) were isolated after transduction for serA+ in a strain (MA197) blocked in agmatine ureohydrolase (AUH) with a mutagenized phage lysate of P1. The new double-polyamine mutants were characterized by an unconditional polyamine dependence; either putrescine or spermidine was required for normal growth. The mutational block was varified by the demonstration of a virtual absence of OD activity in cellular extracts.

    Cunningham-Rundles and Maas isolated Escherichia coli K-12 mutants blocked in ornithine decarboxylase synthesis and verified the loss of OD activity, supporting E. coli K-12 as a direct organismal example for the activity.

Provenance

Identifier source
TraitMech local identifier
Definition source
https://iubmb.qmul.ac.uk/enzyme/EC4/1/1/17.html

Parent traits (1)

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.

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 ornithine decarboxylase activity before adding a TraitRecord xref.

CURATION TODO OPEN ornithine-decarboxylase-activity-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-09-12

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.

GO:0004586 carries the same ornithine decarboxylase activity label but denotes the enzyme molecular function rather than the organism-level ornithine decarboxylase production phenotype, so it is appropriate as a causal-node grounding rather than an equivalent TraitRecord xref.

Curation history

  1. · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex

    Minted ornithine decarboxylase activity as a URL/DOI-backed TraitRecord after a repository-wide duplicate review covering ignored and hidden files; METPO has no exact ornithine decarboxylase activity class yet.