Standard Gibbs energy of metabolic reactions: II. Glucose-6-phosphatase reaction and ATP hydrolysis

Abstract ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is a key reaction for metabolism. Tools from systems biology require standard reaction data in order to predict metabolic pathways accurately. However, literature values for standard Gibbs energy of ATP hydrolysis are highly uncertain and differ strongly from each other. Further, such data usually neglect the activity coefficients of reacting agents, and published data like this is apparent (condition-dependent) data instead of activity-based standard data. In this work a consistent value for the standard Gibbs energy of ATP hydrolysis was determined. The activity coefficients of reacting agents were modeled with electrolyte Perturbed-Chain Statistical Associating Fluid Theory (ePC-SAFT). The Gibbs energy of ATP hydrolysis was calculated by combining the standard Gibbs energies of hexokinase reaction and of glucose-6-phosphate hydrolysis. While the standard Gibbs energy of hexokinase reaction was taken from previous work, standard Gibbs energy of glucose-6-phosphate hydrolysis reaction was determined in this work. For this purpose, reaction equilibrium molalities of reacting agents were measured at pH 7 and pH 8 at 298.15 K at varying initial reacting agent molalities. The corresponding activity coefficients at experimental equilibrium molalities were predicted with ePC-SAFT yielding the Gibbs energy of glucose-6-phosphate hydrolysis of − 13.72 ± 0.75 kJ·mol − 1 . Combined with the value for hexokinase, the standard Gibbs energy of ATP hydrolysis was finally found to be − 31.55 ± 1.27 kJ·mol − 1 . For both, ATP hydrolysis and glucose-6-phosphate hydrolysis, a good agreement with own and literature values were obtained when influences of pH, temperature, and activity coefficients were explicitly taken into account in order to calculate standard Gibbs energy at pH 7, 298.15 K and standard state.