The diversity and dynamics of a bacterial community extracted from an exploited oil field with high natural soil salinity near Comodoro Rivadavia in Patagonia (Argentina) were investigated. Community shifts during long-term incubation with diesel fuel at four salinities between 0 and 20% NaCl were monitored by single-strand conformation polymorphism community fingerprinting of the PCR-amplified...

Alcanivorax borkumensis is an ubiquitous model organism for hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria, which dominates polluted surface waters. Its negligible presence in oil-contaminated deep waters (as observed during the Deepwater Horizon accident) raises the hypothesis that it may lack adaptive mechanisms to hydrostatic pressure (HP). The type strain SK2 was tested under 0.1, 5 and 10 MPa (corresponding...

Six aerobic alkanotrophs (organism that can metabolize alkanes as their sole carbon source) isolated from deep-sea hydrothermal vents were characterized using the radical clock substrate norcarane to determine the metalloenzyme and reaction mechanism used to oxidize alkanes. The organisms studied were Alcanivorax sp. strains EPR7 and MAR14, Marinobacter sp. strain EPR21, Nocardioides sp. strain...

Alcanivorax borkumensis is a marine bacterium that has ability to grow on limited substrates that mainly is alkanes. The ability to use wide range of hydrocarbons is advantage of this bacterium to other marine community bacteria. A. borkumensis have two genetic systems for alkane biodegradation. The First system is alkane hydroxylase (alk-B1and alk-B2) and the second system is...

An improved method was developed that allowed the specific detection of the gene alkB (coding for the rubredoxin dependent alkane monooxygenase) from bacteria without any obvious strain specific discrimination using a combination of PCR and hybridization. This approach enabled a fast culture-independent monitoring of environmental samples for the occurrence of alkB, and an estimation of the gen...

Efforts in phylogenomics have greatly improved our understanding of the backbone tree of life. However, due to the systematic error in sequence data, a sequence-based phylogenomic approach leads to well-resolved but statistically significant incongruence. Thus, independent test of current phylogenetic knowledge is required. Here, we have devised a distance-based strategy to reconstruct a highly...

Eighty-two out of the 100 hydrocarbonoclastic bacterial species that have been already isolated from oil-contaminated Kuwaiti sites, characterized by 16S rRNA nucleotide sequencing, and preserved in our private culture collection, grew successfully in a mineral medium free of any nitrogenous compounds with oil vapor as the sole carbon source. Fifteen out of these 82 species were selected for fu...

The effect of bacterial quorum sensing (QS) signals on the respiration activity of an oil-polluted soil with and without the addition of an alkane-degrading bacterial consortium was investigated. The addition of C4eC12-HSL N-acyl homoserine lactones (AHLs) to the contaminated soil with the bacterial consortium resulted in a significant increase in CO2 evolution rates. Experiments with 1, 10 and...

Ubiquitous bacteria from the genus Oleispira drive oil degradation in the largest environment on Earth, the cold and deep sea. Here we report the genome sequence of Oleispira antarctica and show that compared with Alcanivorax borkumensis--the paradigm of mesophilic hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria--O. antarctica has a larger genome that has witnessed massive gene-transfer events. We identify an arr...

Isoprene is a volatile and climate-altering hydrocarbon with an atmospheric concentration similar to that of methane. It is well established that marine algae produce isoprene; however, until now there was no specific information about marine isoprene sinks. Here we demonstrate isoprene consumption in samples from temperate and tropical marine and coastal environments, and furthermore show that...