Failure of metabolic checkpoint control during late-stage granulopoiesis drives neutropenia in reticular dysgenesis

• Active metabolic checkpoints respond to AK2 deficiency by decreasing anabolic pathways to maintain nutrient homeostasis and proliferation.

• When metabolic checkpoints are ineffective, AK2 deficiency leads to ectopic mTOR activation, nucleotide imbalance, and proliferation arrest.

Cellular metabolism is highly dynamic during hematopoiesis, yet the regulatory networks that maintain metabolic homeostasis during differentiation are incompletely understood. Herein, we have studied the grave immunodeficiency syndrome reticular dysgenesis caused by loss of mitochondrial adenylate kinase 2 (AK2) function. By coupling single-cell transcriptomics in samples from patients with reticular dysgenesis with a CRISPR model of this disorder in primary human hematopoietic stem cells, we found that the consequences of AK2 deficiency for the hematopoietic system are contingent on the effective engagement of metabolic checkpoints. In hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, including early granulocyte precursors, AK2 deficiency reduced mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling and anabolic pathway activation. This conserved nutrient homeostasis and maintained cell survival and proliferation. In contrast, during late-stage granulopoiesis, metabolic checkpoints were ineffective, leading to a paradoxical upregulation of mTOR activity and energy-consuming anabolic pathways such as ribonucleoprotein synthesis in AK2-deficient cells. This caused nucleotide imbalance, including highly elevated adenosine monophosphate and inosine monophosphate levels, the depletion of essential substrates such as NAD⁺ and aspartate, and ultimately resulted in proliferation arrest and demise of the granulocyte lineage. Our findings suggest that even severe metabolic defects can be tolerated with the help of metabolic checkpoints but that the failure of such checkpoints in differentiated cells results in a catastrophic loss of homeostasis.