Applied and Environmental Science
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceSulfur-Oxidizing Symbionts without Canonical Genes for Autotrophic CO2 FixationMany animals and protists depend on symbiotic sulfur-oxidizing bacteria as their main food source. These bacteria use energy from oxidizing inorganic sulfur compounds to make biomass autotrophically from CO2, serving as primary producers for their hosts. Here we describe a clade of nonautotrophic sulfur-oxidizing symbionts, “Candidatus Kentron,” associated with marine ciliates. They lack genes for known autotrophic...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceBacteria Floc, but Do They Flock? Insights from Population Interaction Models of Quorum SensingOur modeling efforts show how cell density can affect chemotaxis; they help to explain the roots of subgroup formation in bacterial populations. Our work also reinforces the notion that bacterial mechanisms are at times exhibited in higher-order organisms.
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceComparative Genomics of Cyanobacterial Symbionts Reveals Distinct, Specialized Metabolism in Tropical Dysideidae SpongesNatural products provide the inspiration for most clinical drugs. With the rise in antibiotic resistance, it is imperative to discover new sources of chemical diversity. Bacteria living in symbiosis with marine invertebrates have emerged as an untapped source of natural chemistry. While symbiotic bacteria are often recalcitrant to growth in the lab, advances in metagenomic sequencing and assembly now make it possible to access their...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceIron Corrosion via Direct Metal-Microbe Electron TransferThe anaerobic corrosion of iron structures is expensive to repair and can be a safety and environmental concern. It has been known for over 100 years that the presence of anaerobic respiratory microorganisms can accelerate iron corrosion. Multiple studies have suggested that there are sulfate reducers, methanogens, and acetogens that can directly accept electrons from Fe(0) to support sulfate or carbon dioxide reduction. However, all of...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceUncultured Microbial Phyla Suggest Mechanisms for Multi-Thousand-Year Subsistence in Baltic Sea SedimentsMuch of life on Earth exists in a very slow-growing state, with microbes from deeply buried marine sediments representing an extreme example. These environments are like natural laboratories that have run multi-thousand-year experiments that are impossible to perform in a laboratory. We borrowed some techniques that are commonly used in laboratory experiments and applied them to these natural samples to make hypotheses about how these...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceRed- and Blue-Light Sensing in the Plant Pathogen Alternaria alternata Depends on Phytochrome and the White-Collar Protein LreALight controls many processes in filamentous fungi. The study of light regulation in a number of model organisms revealed an unexpected complexity. Although the molecular components for light sensing appear to be widely conserved in fungal genomes, the regulatory circuits and the sensitivity of certain species toward specific wavelengths seem different. In N. crassa,...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceCore Metabolism Shifts during Growth on Methanol versus Methane in the Methanotroph Methylomicrobium buryatense 5GB1One-carbon compounds such as methane and methanol are of increasing interest as sustainable substrates for biological production of fuels and industrial chemicals. The bacteria that carry out these conversions have been studied for many decades, but gaps exist in our knowledge of their metabolic pathways. One such gap is the difference between growth on methane and growth on methanol. Understanding such metabolism is important, since...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceSuperoxide Dismutase and Pseudocatalase Increase Tolerance to Hg(II) in Thermus thermophilus HB27 by Maintaining the Reduced Bacillithiol PoolThermus thermophilus is a deep-branching thermophilic aerobe. It is a member of the Deinococcus-Thermus phylum that, together with the Aquificae, constitute the earliest branching aerobic bacterial lineages; therefore, this organism serves as a model for early diverged bacteria (R. K. Hartmann, J. Wolters, B. Kröger, S. Schultze, et al.,...
Author Reply | Applied and Environmental ScienceReply to Mortazavi, “Acquired Antibiotic Resistance in Escherichia coli Exposed to Simulated Microgravity: Possible Role of Other Space Stressors and Adaptive Responses”
Letter to the Editor | Applied and Environmental ScienceAcquired Antibiotic Resistance in Escherichia coli Exposed to Simulated Microgravity: Possible Role of Other Space Stressors and Adaptive Responses