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Tolerance to Various Toxicants by Marine Bacteria Highly Resistant to Mercury

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Abstract

Bacteria highly resistant to mercury isolated from seawater and sediment samples were tested for growth in the presence of different heavy metals, pesticides, phenol, formaldehyde, formic acid, and trichloroethane to investigate their potential for growth in the presence of a variety of toxic xenobiotics. We hypothesized that bacteria resistant to high concentrations of mercury would have potential capacities to tolerate or possibly degrade a variety of toxic materials and thus would be important in environmental pollution bioremediation. The mercury-resistant bacteria were found to belong to Pseudomonas, Proteus, Xanthomonas, Alteromonas, Aeromonas, and Enterobacteriaceae. All these environmental bacterial strains tolerant to mercury used in this study were capable of growth at a far higher concentration (50 ppm) of mercury than previously reported. Likewise, their ability to grow in the presence of toxic xenobiotics, either singly or in combination, was superior to that of bacteria incapable of growth in media containing 5 ppm mercury. Plasmid-curing assays done in this study ascertained that resistance to mercury antibiotics, and toxic xenobiotics is mediated by chromosomally borne genes and/or transposable elements rather than by plasmids.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the encouragement, support, and facilitation by Drs. E. Desa and S.Y.S. Singbal. Mr. R. Nagarajan helped a great deal during sampling. We thank Dr. Russell Hill at the Center of Marine Biotechnology, Baltimore, Md., for various suggestions on this manuscript. Our sincere thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms and valuable suggestions that helped improve the manuscript. This is National Institute of Oceanography contribution number 3751.

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  1. National Institute of Oceanography, Dona Paula, Goa 403 004, India

    Jaysankar De, N. Ramaiah, A. Mesquita & X. N. Verlekar

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  1. Jaysankar De
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  2. N. Ramaiah
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  3. A. Mesquita
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  4. X. N. Verlekar
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Correspondence to Jaysankar De.

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De, J., Ramaiah, N., Mesquita, A. et al. Tolerance to Various Toxicants by Marine Bacteria Highly Resistant to Mercury . Mar. Biotechnol. 5, 185–193 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10126-002-0061-6

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