Author ORCID Identifier
Ranjani Murali: 0000-0003-4073-9910
Robert A. Sanford: 0000-0002-9607-9897
Mackenzie M. Lynes: 0000-0002-9410-0285
Roland Hatzenpichler: 0000-0002-5489-3444
Usha F. Lingappa: 0000-0001-5691-6788
Woodward W. Fischer: 0000-0002-8836-3054
Robert B. Gennis: 0000-0002-3805-6945
James Hemp0000-0001-7193-0553
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-20-2024
Publication Title
PNAS
Abstract
With the advent of culture-independent techniques for studying environmental microbes, our knowledge of their diversity has exploded, uncovering unique organisms, pathways, and proteins carrying out important processes in the biosphere. Novel biochemical reactions are often proposed based on sequence data, but experimental validation is difficult and rare. In this work, we used environmental sequence data to find enzymes that produce the greenhouse gas N2O from NO and validated our hypothesis with experiments. These new enzymes likely contribute to global N2O fluxes and expand the breadth of nitrogen cycling. We also demonstrated that these enzymes evolved multiple times from oxygen reductases, indicating that the evolutionary histories of aerobic respiration and denitrification—and more broadly the oxygen and nitrogen cycles—are tightly connected.
Keywords
denitrification, heme-copper oxygen reductase, nitric oxide reductase, Rhodothermus marinus, aerobic denitrification
Volume
121
Issue
26
First Page
e2316422121
DOI
1https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2316422121
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Murali, Ranjani; Pace, Laura A.; Sanford, Robert A.; Ward, Luce M.; Lynes, Mackenzie M.; Hatzenpichler, Roland; Lingappa, Usha F.; Fischer, Woodward W.; Gennis, Robert B.; and Hemp, James, "Diversity and Evolution of Nitric Oxide Reduction in Bacteria and Archaea" (2024). Geosciences: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/geo_facpubs/223
Comments
Archived as published.