The Human Knockout Gene CLYBL Connects Itaconate to Vitamin B12

CLYBL encodes a ubiquitously expressed mitochondrial enzyme, conserved across all vertebrates, whose cellular activity and pathway assignment are unknown. Its homozygous loss is tolerated in seemingly healthy individuals, with reduced circulating B-12 levels being the only and consistent phenotype reported to date. Here, by combining enzymology, structural biology, and activity-based metabolomics, we report that CLYBL operates as a citramalyl-CoA lyase in mammalian cells. Cells lacking CLYBL accumulate citramalyl-CoA, an intermediate in the C5-dicarboxylate metabolic pathway that includes itaconate, a recently identified human anti-microbial metabolite and immunomodulator. We report that CLYBL loss leads to a cell-autonomous defect in the mitochondrial B-12 metabolism and that itaconyl-CoA is a cofactor-inactivating, substrate-analog inhibitor of the mitochondrial B-12-dependent methylmalonyl-CoA mutase (MUT). Our work de-orphans the function of human CLYBL and reveals that a consequence of exposure to the immunomodulatory metabolite itaconate is B-12 inactivation.