Abstract
Environments co-contaminated with heavy metals and hydrocarbons have become an important problem worldwide, especially due to the effect of metals on hydrocarbon degrading microorganisms. Pseudomonas extremaustralis, a bacterium isolated from a pristine pond in Antarctica, showed high capabilities to cope with environmental stress and a very versatile metabolism that includes alkane degradation under microaerobic conditions. In this work, we analyzed P. extremaustralis’ capability to resist high copper concentrations and the effect of copper presence in diesel biodegradation. We observed that P. extremaustralis resisted up to 4 mM CuSO4 in a rich medium such as LB. This copper resistance is sustained by the presence of the cus and cop operons together with other efflux systems and porins located in a single region in P. extremaustralis genome. When copper was present, diesel degradation was negatively affected, even though copper enhanced bacterial attachment to hydrocarbons. However, when a small amount of glucose (0.05% w/v) was added, the presence of CuSO4 enhanced alkane degradation. In addition, atomic force microscopy analysis showed that the presence of glucose decreased the negative effects produced by copper and diesel on the cell envelopes.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by grants from UBA, CONICET, and ANPCyT. NIL, LL, and LJRI are career investigators from Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET, Argentina). MAC has a postgraduate fellowship from Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET, Argentina).
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Communicated by F. Robb.
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792_2018_1063_MOESM1_ESM.tif
Representative AFM images of live and hydrated P. extremaustralis cells grown on different conditions. PeakForce Error images of P. extremaustralis after 7 days of growth: with diesel as sole carbon source (A); diesel plus copper (B); glucose (C); glucose plus copper (D); glucose plus diesel (E); glucose with copper and diesel (F). (TIFF 6869 kb)
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Colonnella, M.A., Lizarraga, L., Rossi, L. et al. Effect of copper on diesel degradation in Pseudomonas extremaustralis. Extremophiles 23, 91–99 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-018-1063-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-018-1063-2