Chemolithoautotrophic bacteria

It was S.N. Winogradsky (1891) who discovered chemolithoautotrophic bacteria by verifying that the bacteria produce the cellular materials from carbon dioxide 

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In 1958, Peck joined the staff of the enzymology group of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and continued there to work on sulfur metabolism of chemolithoautotrophic bacteria. In 1965, he was called to Athens. Before moving there, he spent a year in the laboratory of Jacques Senez and Jean LeGall. And then he explored the research niche of hydrogenase and sulfur metabolism, which is a gold mine still today, in various directions. 

The ability of the chemolithoautotrophic bacteria Thiobacillus ferrooxidans to oxidize Fe has already been utilized for construction of a microbial sensor for the determination of iron [101]. The limit of determination of this biosensor is 60 pmol 1" with a response time ranging from 30 s to 5 min, depending on the Fe +-concentration in the sample. 

This cycle represents the quantitatively most important C02 fixation pathway in Nature. It is found in most aerobic autotrophic organisms, ranging from diverse photosynthetic and chemolithoautotrophic bacteria to chloroplasts of eukaryotic algae and higher plants [5]. It is centered around carbohydrates, with ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate being the C02 acceptor (Figure 3.1). 

The hydrothermal vent shrimp, Rimicuris exoculata, which is known to be a primary consumer of the chemolithoautotrophic bacteria, contained 13 pg/g of arsenic almost exclusively as arsenobetaine 54. The major parts of the extractable arsenic species in the adductor muscle/mantle tissues and in the gill were present as riboside derivatives 56 and 57, while 54 was present at 16% and 3.6%, respectively, in these tissues... 

The chemolithoautotrophic bacteria participate intimately in the conversion and circulation of inorganic materials on Earth. In this book, mainly the properties of the chemolithoautotrophic bacteria and their relationship to the environment are described. The properties of the chemolithoautotrophic bacteria will be briefly surveyed below before their details are described in the corresponding chapters. 

Cytochrome with heme B or protoheme as the prosthetic group is known as cytochrome b. Cytochrome b functions usually as the electron transfer component. However, the cytochrome system which participates in the oxidation of inorganic compounds in the chemolithoautotrophic bacteria is usually composed of cytochrome c and the terminal oxidase without cytochrome b (Yamanaka, 1996). 

The growth of the chemolithoautotrophic bacteria can be inhibited by paraquat, because the bacteria have NAD(P) reductase. So it is rather mysterious that N. europaea is not affected by the compound at 4 pM. It will be attributable to hydrox-ylamine which is formed as an intermediate metabolite during the oxidation of ammonia by the bacterium that the inhibitory effect of paraquat is not observed with the bacterium. Hydroxylamine is a scavenger of superoxide anion (Elstner et al., 1975). Probably, N. europaea (and other ammonia-oxidizing bacteria) are exceptionally resistant to paraquat, but other chemolithoautotrophs all will be sensitive to paraquat. Therefore, we should take care not to disturb the soil bacteria when we use paraquat as a herbicide. 

As the aim of this book is to treat chemolithoautotrophic bacteria, the lithoau-totrophic sulfur-oxidizing bacteria will be mainly described in this section. The... 

As already mentioned, cyanobacteria and most of the chemolithoautotrophic bacteria fix carbon dioxide through the Calvin-Benson cycle, but some litho-autotrophic bacteria fix carbon dioxide through other pathways. When the green phototrophic bacterium Chloroflexus aurantiacus grows lithoautotrophically, the bacterium fixes carbon dioxide through the 3-hydroxypropionate cycle (Ivanovsky... 

Aleem MIH (1977) Coupling of energy with electron transfer reactions in chemolithoautotrophic bacteria. In Haddock BA, Hamilton WA (eds) Microbial energetics. Cambridge University... 

In the phenomena mentioned above, the bacteria that participate intimately grow only on inorganic compounds. They are referred to as chemolithoautotrophic bacteria. My colleagues and I have actively studied the biochemistry and physiology of chemolithoautotrophic bacteria, and in this book I want to summarize the work... 

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