Pyruvate:quinone oxidoreductase catalyzes the oxidative decarboxylation of pyruvate to acetate and CO 2 with a quinone as the physiological electron acceptor. So far, this enzyme activity has been found only in Escherichia coli. Using 2,6-dichloroindophenol as an artificial electron acceptor, we detected pyruvate:quinone oxidoreductase activity in cell extracts of the amino acid producer Corynebacterium glutamicum. The activity was highest (0.055 ؎ 0.005 U/mg of protein) in cells grown on complex medium and about threefold lower when the cells were grown on medium containing glucose, pyruvate, or acetate as the carbon source. From wild-type C. glutamicum, the pyruvate:quinone oxidoreductase was purified about 180-fold to homogeneity in four steps and subjected to biochemical analysis. The enzyme is a flavoprotein, has a molecular mass of about 232 kDa, and consists of four identical subunits of about 62 kDa. It was activated by Triton X-100, phosphatidylglycerol, and dipalmitoyl-phosphatidylglycerol, and the substrates were pyruvate (k cat ؍ 37. In addition to several dyes (2,6-dichloroindophenol, p-iodonitrotetrazolium violet, and nitroblue tetrazolium), menadione (K m ؍ 106 M) was efficiently reduced by the purified pyruvate:quinone oxidoreductase, indicating that a naphthoquinone may be the physiological electron acceptor of this enzyme in C. glutamicum.Corynebacterium glutamicum is an aerobic, gram-positive organism that grows on a variety of sugars and organic acids and is widely used in the industrial production of amino acids, particularly L-glutamate and L-lysine (40). Due to its importance for the carbon flux distribution within the metabolism and for the precursor supply for amino acid synthesis, the phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP)-pyruvate node of this organism (see Fig. 1) has been intensively studied and much attention has been focused on some of the enzymes involved, e.g., pyruvate kinase, PEP carboxylase, pyruvate carboxylase, and PEP carboxykinase (24,33,34,51,52,55). The oxidative decarboxylation of pyruvate and thus the fueling of the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle with acetyl coenzyme A (acetyl-CoA) in C. glutamicum have been generally attributed to the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (16,40,61).The genome of C. glutamicum has recently been determined and annotated (GenBank accession numbers NC_003450 and BX927147) (35,63), and an open reading frame (cg2891) with significant identity to the Escherichia coli pyruvate oxidase gene (poxB) has been detected (8, 35). This finding indicated the presence of an additional pyruvate-decarboxylating enzyme at the C. glutamicum PEP-pyruvate node (Fig. 1). The E. coli pyruvate oxidase (EC 1.2.2.2) catalyzes the oxidative decarboxylation of pyruvate to acetate and CO 2 (68) and is a nonessential, peripheral membrane protein consisting of four identical subunits each containing tightly bound flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) and loosely bound thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) and Mg 2ϩ (6,26,43,44,68). As the reaction of the enzyme is oxygen independent and uses ubi...