Pulmonary fatty acid synthesis. II. Amino acids as fatty acid precursors in rat lung.

The incorporation of various 14C-labeled amino acids into CO2 and lipids by rat lung slices was examined. Alanine, valine, leucine, isoleucine, aspartate, and glutamate were oxidized by lung tissue, whereas glycine and phenylalanine were not oxidized. Carbon originating from alanine, leucine, and glutamate was incorporated into pulmonary fatty acids by a mechanism indicative of de novo synthesis. Experiments with specifically labeled [14C]aspartate and [14C]glutamate revealed that the complete citrate-malate cycle described by Patel et al. (25) is of minor importance in pulmonary lipogenesis due to the extremely low activity of NADP-malate dehydrogenase. Glucose and pyruvate were also actively incorporated into fatty acids, and it is suggested that citrate in pulmonary tissue, as in other tissues, plays an important role in the transport of acetyl units from the mitochondria to the cell cytosol during lipogenesis from various carbohydrate and amino acid substrates.