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

Comments

Archived as published.

Included in

Geology Commons

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