How Does the Alarmone ppGpp Change Bacterial Cell Metabolism? From Genome-wide Approaches to Structure to Physiology.

Wang et al. (2020) show that binding of the second messenger ppGpp to inosine-guanosine kinase (Gsk) in E. coli modulates the levels of the key metabolite phosphoribosyl pyrophosphate (pRpp), decreasing purine synthesis to favor amino acid synthesis during stress adaptation.