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bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.05.23.727275

Nitrosomes: protein language modeling and live-cell imaging reveal condensate-like nitrogenase organization in heterocysts

Young, J.·Tian, S.·Gu, L.·Nelson, D.·Zhu, H.·Gibbons, J.·Nawaz, T.·Zhou, R.
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Abstract

Biological nitrogen fixation in some filamentous cyanobacteria occurs in heterocysts, yet the subcellular organization of nitrogenase in these cells remains poorly defined. Using fluorescence microscopy of living Anabaena sp. PCC 7120, we found that a NifH-GFP fusion forms discrete puncta restricted to mature heterocysts, whereas constitutively expressed GFP in vegetative cells and a nifB-linked GFP reporter remained diffuse. To contextualize this phenotype, we built a homology-aware cyanobacterial condensate-prioritization framework across 31,028 proteins from seven proteomes, integrating ESM-2 embeddings, 27 biophysical features, and 44 curated condensate-associated positives. Because direct positives remain limited, we present the model as a ranking resource rather than a calibrated classifier. Under a deliberately conservative nitrogenase-withheld analysis that removed nitrogenase-family labels and homologous clusters from the training data, NifH retained a median rank in the highest-scoring 4.8% of cyanobacterial proteins. catGRANULE 2.0 also assigned high scores to nitrogenase iron proteins, while having only modest rank concordance to the whole atlas. Together, these data identify heterocyst-restricted NifH-GFP puncta as evidence of sub-cellular spatial organization and provide a curated resource for prioritizing cyanobacterial condensate candidates, some of which are also important for nitrogen fixation.

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Young, J., Tian, S., Gu, L., Nelson, D., Zhu, H., Gibbons, J., Nawaz, T., Zhou, R.. 2026-05-26. Nitrosomes: protein language modeling and live-cell imaging reveal condensate-like nitrogenase organization in heterocysts. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.05.23.727275

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