Bioavailability of pollutants and chemotaxis.

Tino Krell, Jesús Lacal, Jose Antonio Reyes-Darias, Celia Jimenez-Sanchez, Rungroch Sungthong, Jose Julio Ortega-Calvo

Department of Environmental Protection, CSIC, Estación Experimental del Zaidín, Profesor Albareda 1, 18008 Granada, Spain.

Current opinion in biotechnology 2013 Jun

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The exposure of bacteria to pollutants induces frequently chemoattraction or chemorepellent reactions. Recent research suggests that the capacity to degrade a toxic compound has co-evolved in some bacteria with the capacity to chemotactically react to it. There is an increasing amount of data which show that chemoattraction to biodegradable pollutants increases their bioavailability which translates into an enhancement of the biodegradation rate. Pollutant chemoreceptors so far identified are encoded on degradation or resistance plasmids. Genetic engineering of bacteria, such as the transfer of chemoreceptor genes, offers thus the possibility to optimize biodegradation processes. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Citation

Tino Krell, Jesús Lacal, Jose Antonio Reyes-Darias, Celia Jimenez-Sanchez, Rungroch Sungthong, Jose Julio Ortega-Calvo. Bioavailability of pollutants and chemotaxis. Current opinion in biotechnology. 2013 Jun;24(3):451-6