New insights into metabolic properties of marine bacteria encoding proteorhodopsins |
| |
Authors: | Sabehi Gazalah Loy Alexander Jung Kwang-Hwan Partha Ranga Spudich John L Isaacson Tal Hirschberg Joseph Wagner Michael Béjà Oded |
| |
Institution: | 1 Department of Biology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, 2 Department of Microbial Ecology, University of Vienna, Austria, 3 Center for Membrane Biology, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas Medical School, Houston, Texas, United States of America, 4 Department of Genetics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel |
| |
Abstract: | Proteorhodopsin phototrophy was recently discovered in oceanic surface waters. In an effort to characterize uncultured proteorhodopsin-exploiting bacteria, large-insert bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries from the Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea were analyzed. Fifty-five BACs carried diverse proteorhodopsin genes, and we confirmed the function of five. We calculate that proteorhodopsin-exploiting bacteria account for 13% of microorganisms in the photic zone. We further show that some proteorhodopsin-containing bacteria possess a retinal biosynthetic pathway and a reverse sulfite reductase operon, employed by prokaryotes oxidizing sulfur compounds. Thus, these novel phototrophs are an unexpectedly large and metabolically diverse component of the marine microbial surface water. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 PubMed 等数据库收录! |
| 点击此处可从《PLoS Biology》浏览原始摘要信息 |
| 点击此处可从《PLoS Biology》下载免费的PDF全文 |
|