Cohn’s Crenothrix is a filamentous methane oxidizer with an unusual methane monooxygenase

Autor: Bernd Bendinger, Jeppe Lund Nielsen, Christian Baranyi, Kilian Stoecker, Michael Wagner, Per Halkjær Nielsen, Björn Schöning, Holger Daims, Elena R. Toenshoff
Rok vydání: 2006
Předmět:
Zdroj: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 103:2363-2367
ISSN: 1091-6490
0027-8424
Popis: 135 years ago Ferdinand Cohn, the founder of bacteriology, microscopically observed a conspicuous filamentous bacterium with a complex life cycle and described it as Crenothrix polyspora . This uncultured bacterium is infamous for mass developments in drinking water systems, but its phylogeny and physiology remained unknown. We show that C. polyspora is a gammaproteobacterium closely related to methanotrophs and capable of oxidizing methane. We discovered that C. polyspora encodes a phylogenetically very unusual particulate methane monooxygenase whose expression is strongly increased in the presence of methane. Our findings demonstrate a previously unrecognized complexity of the evolutionary history and cell biology of methane-oxidizing bacteria.
Databáze: OpenAIRE