Role of Inorganic Polyphosphate in the Energy Metabolism of Ticks

Inorganic polyphosphates are long chains of a few to several hundred phosphate residues linked by phosphoanhydride bonds (Figure 1). Polyphosphates have been found in all cell types examined to date and have been demonstrated to play diverse roles depending on the cell type and circumstances (Kornberg et al., 1999; Kulaev & Kulakovskaya, 2000). The biological roles played by polyphosphates have been most extensively studied in prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes, where they have been shown to regulate many biochemical processes including the metabolism and transport of inorganic phosphate, cation sequestration and storage (Kornberg et al., 1999), and membrane channel formation (Reusch, 1989; Jones et al., 2003), and they have also been found to be involved in cell envelope formation and bacterial pathogenesis (Rashid et al., 2000; Kim et al., 2002), the regulation of gene and enzyme activities (McInerney et al., 2006), the activation of Lon proteases (Kuroda et al., 2001), and KcsA channel regulation (Negoda et al., 2009).