Competition assay Competition assays MI-503 cost were carried out to investigate the involvement of UndA in iron reduction. Wild-type, ΔmtrC, ΔundA and ΔmtrC-undA mutants were grown to exponential phase at OD600 of 0.6 aerobically. Equal volumes of culture were mixed together and inoculated by 1:100 dilutions into anaerobic LB medium supplemented with 50 mM sodium lactate and 20 mM ferric citrate. The co-cultures were transferred to fresh anaerobic medium in 1:100 dilutions
on the daily basis. Samples were taken at Day one, three and seven and plated on LB plates aerobically. Colony PCR (96 colonies per plate, 3 replicates) with primers listed in Additional file 1: Table S2 was used to determine the ratios. Sequence analysis Protein sequences were retrieved from the NCBI database by using BLASTP searches. The Clustal W software and the on-line tool Phylodendron (http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/treeapp/treeprint-form.html) were used for the multiple alignment
and phylogenetic tree construction. Results Comparison of iron reduction between Shewanella putrefaciens W3-18-1 and Shewanella VRT752271 research buy oneidensis MR-1 W3-18-1 was shown previously to reduce Fe(III) oxide [27], which prompted us to conduct a comparison between W3-18-1 and MR-1 in reducing soluble or insoluble Fe(III) forms. To this end, the abilities of W3-18-1 and MR-1 in Fe(III) reduction were compared in liquid cultures supplemented with one of the following Fe(III) reagents as the sole electron acceptor: ferric citrate, α-FeO(OH), CYT387 chemical structure β-FeO(OH), and Fe2O3. ifenprodil All of the iron forms are insoluble except ferric citrate. α-FeO(OH), β-FeO(OH) and Fe2O3 are the major components of goethite, akaganeite and hematite, respectively. Across all of the five time
points examined, W3-18-1 showed consistently higher iron reduction capacities than MR-1 when α-FeO(OH) was provided as electron acceptor (Figure 1). In contrast, iron reduction capacities with other iron forms were similar between W3-18-1 and MR-1. To verify it, a complementary non-parametric multivariate statistical test using adonis algorithm was carried out. The results indicated that the differences between W3-18-1 and MR-1 was significant for α-FeO(OH), but not other irons (see insets of Figure 1). Figure 1 Comparison of anaerobic (A) α- FeO(OH), (B) β- FeO(OH) (C) Fe 2 O 3 and (D) ferric citrate reduction between MR-1 and W3-18-1. A negative control was included, in which no bacterial cells were inoculated. Reduction of Fe(III) to Fe(II) was monitored using ferrozine at 562 nm. Data are averages for triplicates and error bars indicate standard deviation. The insets indicate significance of the dissimilarity test of adonis. Genes implicated in iron reduction All of the currently sequenced Shewanella genomes except Shewanella denitrificans contain an mtr-omc gene cluster that encodes several proteins predicted to be associated with metal reduction [13, 28]. Among these, mtrBAC are omnipresent and conserved in the cluster (Figure 2A).