Does a cell perform isoelectric focusing?

A possible role of intracellular isoelectric focusing in the evolution of eukaryotic cells and multicellular organisms

A new scenario of the origin of eukaryotic cell and multicellularity is presented. A concentric pH-gradient has been shown to exist in the cytosol of eukaryotic cells. The most probable source of such gradient is its self-formation in gradient of electric field between center and periphery of a cell. Theoretical analysis has shown that, for example, a cell of Saccharomyces cerevisiae has enough energy to continuously sustain such gradient of strength about 1.5 kV/cm, the value sufficient for effective isoelectric focusing of cytoplasmic proteins. Focusing of enzymes could highly increase the effectiveness of an otherwise diffusion-limited metabolism of large cells by concentrating enzymes into small and distinct parts of a cytoplasm. By taking away an important physical constraint to the volume of cytoplasm, the intracellular isoelectric focusing enabled evolution of cells 3-4 order of magnitude larger than typical prokaryotic cells. This opened the way for the origin of phagocytosis and lately for the development of different forms of endosymbiosis, some of them resulting in an endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria and plastids. The large volume of a cell-enabled separation of nuclear and cytoplasmic compartments which was a precondition for separation of transcription and translation processes and therefore also for the origin of various RNA-preprocessing mechanisms. The possibility to regulate gene expression by postprocessing RNA and to regulate metabolism by an electrophoretic translocation enzymes between different parts of cytoplasm by changing their isoelectric points opened the way for cell and tissue differentiation and therefore for the origin of complex multicellular organisms.

pH-induced intracellular protein transport

A new mechanism of selective transport and localization of proteins inside any living cell is presented. The mechanism is based on pH-induced protein trapping. It is shown that spontaneous and unique spatial redistribution of different proteins is possible in any aqueous solution with stable non-uniform distribution of H(+) ions. This phenomenon was observed in artificial systems with fixed non-uniform pH distribution and in living cells.