ArticleThe ISME journal2017
An alternative polysaccharide uptake mechanism of marine bacteria.
Article in The ISME journal, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 91 papers.
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91 citing papers in PubMed, 187 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Mechanisms of recalcitrant fucoidan breakdown in marine Planctomycetota.Nature communications · 2024Article
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31 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Heterotrophic microbial communities process much of the carbon fixed by phytoplankton in the ocean, thus having a critical role in the global carbon cycle. A major fraction of the phytoplankton-derived substrates are high-molecular-weight (HMW) polysaccharides. For bacterial uptake, these substrates must initially be hydrolysed to smaller sizes by extracellular enzymes. We investigated polysaccharide hydrolysis by microbial communities during a transect of the Atlantic Ocean, and serendipitously discovered-using super-resolution structured illumination microscopy-that up to 26% of total cells showed uptake of fluorescently labelled polysaccharides (FLA-PS). Fluorescence in situ hybridisation identified these organisms as members of the bacterial phyla Bacteroidetes and Planctomycetes and the gammaproteobacterial genus Catenovulum. Simultaneous membrane staining with nile red indicated that the FLA-PS labelling occurred in the cell but not in the cytoplasm. The dynamics of FLA-PS staining was further investigated in pure culture experiments using Gramella forsetii, a marine member of Bacteroidetes. The staining patterns observed in environmental samples and pure culture tests are consistent with a 'selfish' uptake mechanisms of larger oligosaccharides (>600 Da), as demonstrated for gut Bacteroidetes. Ecologically, this alternative polysaccharide uptake mechanism secures substantial quantities of substrate in the periplasmic space, where further processing can occur without diffusive loss. Such a mechanism challenges the paradigm that hydrolysis of HMW substrates inevitably yields low-molecular-weight fragments that are available to the surrounding community and demonstrates the importance of an alternative mechanism of polysaccharide uptake in marine bacteria.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.