Publication Date:
2014-08-12
Description:
In the biogeochemical nitrogen cycle, microbial respiration processes compete for nitrate as an electron acceptor. Denitrification converts nitrate into nitrogenous gas and thus removes fixed nitrogen from the biosphere, whereas ammonification converts nitrate into ammonium, which is directly reusable by primary producers. We combined multiple parallel long-term incubations of marine microbial nitrate-respiring communities with isotope labeling and metagenomics to unravel how specific environmental conditions select for either process. Microbial generation time, supply of nitrite relative to nitrate, and the carbon/nitrogen ratio were identified as key environmental controls that determine whether nitrite will be reduced to nitrogenous gas or ammonium. Our results define the microbial ecophysiology of a biogeochemical feedback loop that is key to global change, eutrophication, and wastewater treatment.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Kraft, Beate -- Tegetmeyer, Halina E -- Sharma, Ritin -- Klotz, Martin G -- Ferdelman, Timothy G -- Hettich, Robert L -- Geelhoed, Jeanine S -- Strous, Marc -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Aug 8;345(6197):676-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1254070.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, 28359 Bremen, Germany. ; Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, 28359 Bremen, Germany. Institute for Genome Research and Systems Biology, Center for Biotechnology, University of Bielefeld, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany. ; UT-ORNL Graduate School of Genome Science and Technology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA. Chemical Science Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA. ; Department of Biological Sciences, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA. State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China. ; Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, 28359 Bremen, Germany. NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, 4401NT Yerseke, Netherlands. ; Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, 28359 Bremen, Germany. Institute for Genome Research and Systems Biology, Center for Biotechnology, University of Bielefeld, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany. Department of Geoscience, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada. mstrous@ucalgary.ca.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25104387" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Anaerobiosis
;
Aquatic Organisms/genetics/*metabolism
;
Bacteria/genetics/*metabolism
;
*Denitrification
;
*Environment
;
Metagenomics
;
Nitrates/*metabolism
;
Seawater/*microbiology
;
Waste Water/chemistry/microbiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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