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The isolation and initial characterization of mercury resistant chemolithotrophic thermophilic bacteria from mercury rich geothermal springs

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Abstract

Mercury rich geothermal springs are likely environments where mercury resistance is critical to microbial life and where microbe-mercury interactions may have evolved. Eleven facultative thermophilic and chemolithoautotrophic, thiosulfate oxidizing bacteria were isolated from thiosulfate enrichments of biofilms from mercury rich hot sulfidic springs in Mount Amiata, Italy. Some strains were highly resistant to mercury (≥200 μM HgCl2) regardless of its presence or absence during primary enrichments, and three reduced ionic mercury to its elemental form. The gene encoding for the mercuric reductase enzyme (MerA), was amplified by PCR from seven strains. However, one highly resistant strain did not reduce mercury nor carried merA, suggesting an alternative resistance mechanism. All strains were members of the order Bacillales and were most closely related to previously described thermophiles belonging to the Firmicutes. Phylogenetic analyses clustered the MerA of the isolates in two supported novel nodes within the Firmicutes lineage and a comparison with the 16S rRNA gene tree suggested at least one case of horizontal gene transfer. Overall, the results show that the thermophilic thiosulfate oxidizing isolates were adapted to life in presence of mercury mostly, but not exclusively, by possessing MerA. These findings suggest that reduction of mercury by chemolithotrophic thermophilic bacteria may mobilize mercury from sulfur and iron deposits in geothermal environments.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Meir and Martha Pinjasi for assistance during sample collection and P. Stapleton for advice in the use of primers UmerA-F and UmerA-R. This research was partially funded by the Environmental Remediation Science Program (ERSP), Biological and Environmental Research (BER), US Department of Energy (Grant DE-FG02-99ER62864 to TB) and the National Science Foundation (Grants OCE 03-27353 and MCB 04-56676 to CV).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rutgers University, 76 Lipman Dr., New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Aspassia D. Chatziefthimiou, Melitza Crespo-Medina, Yanping Wang, Costantino Vetriani & Tamar Barkay

  2. Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Melitza Crespo-Medina & Costantino Vetriani

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  1. Aspassia D. Chatziefthimiou
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  2. Melitza Crespo-Medina
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  3. Yanping Wang
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  4. Costantino Vetriani
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  5. Tamar Barkay
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Correspondence to Tamar Barkay.

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Communicated by K. Horikoshi.

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Chatziefthimiou, A.D., Crespo-Medina, M., Wang, Y. et al. The isolation and initial characterization of mercury resistant chemolithotrophic thermophilic bacteria from mercury rich geothermal springs. Extremophiles 11, 469–479 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-007-0065-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-007-0065-2

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