Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology

, Volume 101, Issue 7, pp 2967–2978 | Cite as

Role of exopolysaccharide in salt stress resistance and cell motility of Mesorhizobium alhagi CCNWXJ12–2T

  • Xiaodong Liu
  • Yantao Luo
  • Zhefei Li
  • Jiamei Wang
  • Gehong Wei
Applied genetics and molecular biotechnology
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Revised:
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Abstract

Mesorhizobium alhagi, a legume-symbiont soil bacterium that forms nodules with the desert plant Alhagi sparsifolia, can produce large amounts of exopolysaccharide (EPS) using mannitol as carbon source. However, the role of EPS in M. alhagi CCNWXJ12-2T, an EPS-producing rhizobium with high salt resistance, remains uncharacterized. Here, we studied the role of EPS in M. alhagi CCNWXJ12-2T using EPS-deficient mutants constructed by transposon mutagenesis. The insertion sites of six EPS-deficient mutants were analyzed using single primer PCR, and two putative gene clusters were found to be involved in EPS synthesis. EPS was extracted and quantified, and EPS production in the EPS-deficient mutants was decreased by approximately 25 times compared with the wild-type strain. Phenotypic analysis revealed reduced salt resistance, antioxidant capacity, and cell motility of the mutants compared with the wild-type strain. In conclusion, our results indicate that EPS can influence cellular Na+ content and antioxidant enzyme activity, as well as play an important role in the stress adaption and cell motility of M. alhagi CCNWXJ12-2T.

Keywords

Exopolysaccharide Mini-Tn5 Cell motility Antioxidant capacity Mesorhizobium alhagi 
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Notes

Compliance with ethical standards

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research & Development Program (2016YFD0200308) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (41671261, 31370142, 31270012).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Supplementary material

253_2017_8114_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (269 kb)
ESM 1 Table S1 Primers used in this study (PDF 269 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Xiaodong Liu
    • 1
  • Yantao Luo
    • 1
  • Zhefei Li
    • 1
  • Jiamei Wang
    • 1
  • Gehong Wei
    • 1
  1. 1.College of Life Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Crop Stress Biology in Arid AreasNorthwest Agriculture and Forestry UniversityYanglingChina

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