Bacteria metabolic processes

Usually fairly high concentrations of such a drug are needed for effective control of an infection because the inhibitor (the false substrate) should occupy as many active centers as possible, and also because the natural substrate will probably have a greater affinity for the enzyme. Thus the equilibrium must be influenced and, by using a high concentration of the false substrate, the false substrate-enzyme complex can be made to predominate. The bacteria, deprived of a normal metabolic process, cannot grow and multiply. Now the body s defense mechanisms can take over and destroy them. 

It has been known for some time that certain types of bacteria spend a certain amount of their lifespan in a dormant state. The bacteria are then known as en-dospores , or just spores . In this state, they appear not to undergo any metabolic processes and are important particularly because of their heat resistance. The formation of spores is a highly complex process of bacterial cell differentiation. 

The pollutant degradation by WRF is a co-metabolic process in which additional C and N sources are required. This capacity represents an advantage respect bacteria as it prevents the need to internalize the pollutant, thus avoiding toxicity problems and permitting to attack low-soluble compounds. 

Specific damage to bacteria is particularly practicable when a substance interferes with a metabolic process that occurs in bacterial but not in host cells. Clearly this applies to inhibitors of cell wall synthesis, because human and animal cells lack a cell wall. The points of attack of antibacterial agents are schematically illustrated in a grossly simplified bacterial cell, as depicted in (2). 

The success of antibacterial therapy hinges largely on the fact that the metabolism of bacteria differs sufficiently from that of the host so that it is possible to interfere selectively with this process. Viral infections have been much more difficult to treat because the organism in effect takes over the metabolic processes of the host cell ... 

Sulfur dioxide is produced by both natural and anthropogenic sources. The most important of the natural sources are volcanic eruptions, which account for about 40 percent of all natural emissions of the gas. Since volcanic eruptions are episodic events, the amount of sulfur dioxide attributable to this source in any one year varies widely. Other natural sources of the gas are forest fires and other natural burns, biological decay, and certain metabolic processes carried out by living organisms, especially marine plankton and bacteria. Natural sources release about 27.5 million short tons (25 million metric tons) of sulfur dioxide per year. 

Bacteria which oxidize ferrous iron (Fe2+) to ferric iron (Fe3+) such as Gallionella and Leptothrix species are termed metal-depositing bacteria. The result of this metabolic process is the formation of ferric hydroxide. 

Oxidation of insoluble mineral sulfides to the usually water-soluble sulfates (PbS04 is an exception) can also be carried out in many cases by microbial leaching, that is, by the use of bacteria such as Thiobacillus fer-rooxidans which can use the sulfide-sulfate redox cycle to drive metabolic processes. The overall reaction still consumes oxygen... 

However, active uptake mechanisms have now been found in some bacteria for various xenobiotic organic anions. These include 4-chlorobenzoate (Groenewegen et al., 1990), 4-toluene sulfonate (Locher et al., 1993), 2,4-D (Leveau et al., 1998), mecoprop and dichlorprop (Zipper et al., 1998), and even aminopolycarboxylates (Egli, 2001). Such active uptake appears to be driven by the proton motive force (i.e., accumulation of protons in bacterial cytoplasm). These transport mechanisms exhibit saturation kinetics (e.g., Zipper et al., 1998), and so their quantitative treatment is the same as other enzyme-limited metabolic processes (discussed below as Michaelis-Menten cases). 

All these polyesters are produced by bacteria in some stressed conditions in which they are deprived of some essential component for their normal metabolic processes. Under normal conditions of balanced growth the bacteria utilizes any substrate for energy and growth, whereas under stressed conditions bacteria utilize any suitable substrate to produce polyesters as reserve material. When the bacteria can no longer subsist on the oiganic substrate as a result of depletion, they consume the reserve for energy and food for survival or upon removal of the stress, the reserve is consumed and normal activities resumed. This cycle is utilized to produce the polymers which are harvested at maximum cell yield. This process has been treated in more detail in a paper (71) on the mechanism of biosynthesis of poly(hydroxyalkanoate)s. 

Methanopterin (20) is a folate analogue that is isolated from an archae-bacteria, Methanosarcina thermophila, and the bacteria produces methane from CO2 under anaerobic conditions [18-24]. In the methane-producing metabolic process (Scheme 2), tetrahydromethanopterin (21) is known to work as a cofactor for the reduction of the Ci unit. Here, 21 accepts a formyl group that originates from CO2 and transforms it into the formyl... 

---