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Moderate oxygen depletion as a factor favouring the filamentous growth of Sphaerotilus natans

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek volume 107, pages 1135–1144 (2015)Cite this article

Abstract

Sphaerotilus natans is a neutrophilic iron-related sheath-forming filamentous microorganism that presents dual morphotype: single cells and ensheathed cells forming filaments. As S. natans has been proposed as a sorbent for inorganic pollutants and it is occasionally involved in bulking episodes, elucidating factors affecting its filamentous growth is of crucial interest. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the effect of dissolved oxygen (DO) as a factor affecting S. natans filamentation from single cells. A method to quantify S. natans in its filamentous and single-cell morphotypes, based on a differential filtration procedure coupled with quantitative real-time PCR, was developed here. Scanning Electron Microscopy was used to validate the filtration step. Under actively aerated conditions (DO maintained at 7.6 ± 0.1 mg l−1), S. natans grew mainly as single cells throughout the experiment, while a depletion in DO concentration (to ~3 mg l−1) induced its filamentous growth. Indeed, when oxygen was reduced the proportion of single cells diminished from 83.3 ± 5.9  to 14.3 ± 3.4 % while the filaments increased from 16.7 ± 5.9  to 85.7 ± 3.4 %. Our results suggest that oxygen plays a key role in S. natans filamentation and contribute to better understanding of the filamentous proliferation of this bacterium. In addition, the proposed method will be helpful to evaluate other factors favouring filamentous growth.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the European Commission for providing financial support through the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme ETeCoS3 (Environmental Technologies for Contaminated Solids, Soils and Sediments) under the Grant agreement FPA n 2010-0009. In addition, the authors would like to thank Dr. Karim Benzerara for fruitful discussion and Imène Esteve for her help with Scanning Electron Microscope analyses. The purchase of the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) facility of the Institut de Minéralogie, de Physique des Matériaux et de Cosmochimie (IMPMC) was supported by Région Ile-de-France grant SESAME 2006 N°I-07-593/R, INSU-CNRS, INP-CNRS, University Pierre et Marie Curie–Paris 6, and by the French National Research Agency (ANR) Grant no. ANR-07-BLAN-0124-01. The Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope (CLSM) Zeiss Axiovert 200 M LSM 510 META and the CFX 96™ Real-Time PCR Detection System (Bio Rad) used in this work are part of the MIMOSE experimental platform, and were funded by the Région Ile-de-France.

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Author notes

  1. Sébastien Lacroix

    Present address: Veolia Environnement Recherche and Innovation - Pôle Biotechnologies et Agronomie, Centre de Recherche Veolia Environnement de Maisons Laffitte, Maisons - Laffitte, France

Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Géomatériaux et Environnement (LGE) (EA 4508), Institut Francilien des Sciences Appliquées, Université Paris-Est UPEM, Bât. IFI, 5 Boulevard Descartes - Champs sur Marne, 77454, Marne-la-vallée, Cedex 2, France

    Marina Seder-Colomina & Eric D. Van Hullebusch

  2. Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Via Di Biasio 43, 03043, Cassino, FR, Italy

    Marina Seder-Colomina & Giovanni Esposito

  3. Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies pour l’environnement et l’agriculture (Irstea), UR HBAN, CS 10030, 92761, Antony Cedex, France

    Anne Goubet, Sébastien Lacroix & Jean-Jacques Pernelle

  4. Institut de Minéralogie, de Physique des Matériaux, et de Cosmochimie (IMPMC), UMR 7590, CNRS, UPMC, MNHN, IRD, 4 place Jussieu, 75252, Paris, Cedex 05, France

    Guillaume Morin & Georges Ona-Nguema

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  1. Marina Seder-Colomina
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Correspondence to Marina Seder-Colomina.

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Seder-Colomina, M., Goubet, A., Lacroix, S. et al. Moderate oxygen depletion as a factor favouring the filamentous growth of Sphaerotilus natans . Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 107, 1135–1144 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-015-0405-7

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Keywords

  • Filamentous bacteria
  • Dissolved oxygen
  • Sphaerotilus natans
  • qPCR