Clarifying Microbial Nitrous Oxide Reduction under Aerobic Conditions: Tolerant, Intolerant, and Sensitive.

One of the major challenges for the bioremediation application of microbial nitrous oxide (NO) reduction is its oxygen sensitivity. While a few strains were reported capable of reducing NO under aerobic conditions, the NO reduction kinetics of phylogenetically diverse NO reducers are not well understood. Here, we analyzed and compared the kinetics of clade I and clade II NO-reducing bacteria in the presence or absence of oxygen (O) by using a whole-cell assay with NO and O microsensors.

Diverse Protein Architectures and α--Methylation Patterns Define Split Borosin RiPP Biosynthetic Gene Clusters.

Borosins are ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) with α--methylations installed on the peptide backbone that impart unique properties like proteolytic stability to these natural products. The borosin RiPP family was initially reported only in fungi until our recent discovery and characterization of a Type IV split borosin system in the metal-respiring bacterium . Here, we used hidden Markov models and sequence similarity networks to identify over 1600 putative pathways that show split borosin biosynthetic gene clusters are widespread in bacteria.