Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 103, Issue 7, Pages 2363-2367Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0506361103
Keywords
drinking water; methane-oxidizing bacteria
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135 years ago Ferdinand Cohn, the founder of bacteriology, microscopically observed a conspicuous filamentous bacterium with a complex life cycle and described it as Crenothrix polyspora. This uncultured bacterium is infamous for mass developments in drinking water systems, but its phylogeny and physiology remained unknown. We show that C. polyspora is a gammaproteobacterium closely related to methanotrophs and capable of oxidizing methane. We discovered that C. polyspora encodes a phylogenetically very unusual particulate methane monooxygenase whose expression is strongly increased in the presence of methane. Our findings demonstrate a previously unrecognized complexity of the evolutionary history and cell biology of methane-oxidizing bacteria.
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