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A microbiologist's odyssey: Bacterial viruses to photosynthetic bacteria

  • Personal Perspective
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Abstract

Perspective can be defined as the relationships or relative importance of facts or matters from any special point of view. Thus, my Personal perspective reflects the threads I followed in a 50-year journey of research in the complex tapestry of bioenergetics and various aspects of microbial metabolism. An early interest in biochemical and microbial evolution led to the fertile hunting grounds of anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria. Viewed as a physiological class, these organisms show remarkable metabolic versatility in that certain individual species are capable of using all the known major types of energy conversion (photosynthetic, respiratory, and fermentative) to support growth. Since such anoxyphototrophs are readily amenable to molecular genetic/biological manipulation, it can be expected that they will eventually provide important clues for unraveling the evolutionary relationships of the several kinds of energy conversion. I gradually came to believe that understanding the evolution of phototrophs would require detailed knowledge not only of how light is converted to chemical energy, but also of a) pathways of monomer production from extracellular sources of carbon and nitrogen and b) mechanisms cells use for integrating ATP regeneration with the energy-requiring biosyntheses of biological macromolecules. Serendipic observation of photoproduction of H2 from organic compounds by Rhodospirillum rubrum in 1949 led to discovery of N2 fixation by anoxyphototrophs, and this capacity was later exploited for the isolation of hitherto unknown species of photosynthetic prokaryotes, including the heliobacteria. Recent studies on the reaction centers of the heliobacteria suggest the possibility that these bacteria are descendents of early phototrophs that gave rise to oxygenic photosynthetic organisms.

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Abbreviations

AMP:

adenosine monophosphate

ADP:

adenosine diphosphate

ATP:

adenosine triphosphate

ATPase:

adenosine triphosphatase

Bchl:

bacteriochlorophyll

DMSO:

dimethyl sulfoxide

NADH:

reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide

nif − :

genes for dinitrogen fixation

Nif− :

bacterial mutants incapable of dinitrogen fixation

O/R:

oxidation/reduction

Pi :

inorganic orthophosphate

R. capsulatus :

Rhodobacter capsulatus

R. sphaeroides :

Rhodobacter sphaeroides

Rps. :

Rhodopseudomonas

TMAO:

trimethyl amine-N-oxide

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  1. Photosynthetic Bacteria Group, Department of Biology, Indiana University, 47405, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Howard Gest

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Written at the invitation of Govindjee.

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Gest, H. A microbiologist's odyssey: Bacterial viruses to photosynthetic bacteria. Photosynth Res 40, 129–146 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00019331

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