So what? Haven’t we heard enough of the Pseudomonas genus? Well, maybe not. Let’s have a discussion about what happens when you go to a gas station and get a soda (or pop, whichever you prefer). There’s a fair-to-decent chance you’ll be getting a Styrofoam® cup, which is made of polystyrene. So how does one get some polystyrene? Have some styrene, toss in some magic, and bam, polystyrene of several different types, with different sized pockets of air in different arrangements based on specifications. It’s pretty handy. The only problem is that it doesn’t degrade in the environment and sits around for hundreds of years, or something to that effect. Also, styrene is toxic. In the United States alone it accounts for 55 million pounds of hazardous waste. It causes lung irritation and muscle weakness, and affects the brain and nervous system in people and animals. This turns out to be a pretty nasty thing, so what do we do with it? We use underground injection, burning it in furnaces, and spreading it over land. These all cause more toxic emissions. For those of you who dozed off, that’s a bad thing.
These guys, Kevin O’Connor and Patrick Ward, at a university in Dublin, were hanging out and doing that whole science and technology thing when they figured out “Hey, we can grow Pseudomonas putida in a bioreactor with styrene as its only carbon source, that’s kind of nifty” (not a direct quote). Another neat side effect is that what comes out of the bioreactor instead of styrene (the P. putida hard at work) is a plastic polymer commonly referred to as PHA (Polyhydroxyalkanoate) that is a biodegradable plastic. What a snazzy little microbe.
Okay, so now on to the boring stuff. Pseudomonas putida is gram-negative, rod-shaped, and has multitrichous flagella. Don’t ask me what multitrichous means, just search for it on the interweb. A little more nifty stuff, it can survive in a wide range of environments, is easily isolatable from soil or water samples, and can break down things like benzene, xylene, toluene, TNT, and other organic solvents and such. It is generally non-pathogenic, though there are a couple of cases where it helps cause septicemia in patients who were already sick (these are few, mind you). Because it’s closely related to Pseudomonas aeruginosa (also available on the UMR Microbiology page for this semester) it is being used for research into cystic fibrosis. It could aid in understanding into why its relative is pathogenic and an all around bad cousin. I suppose that’s my discussion on P. putida. Maybe you learned something, maybe you enjoyed it, or maybe you’re just really bored. Whatever the case, I wish you the best of luck.
References
http://genome.jgi-psf.org/draft_microbes/psepu/psepu.home.html
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/annieappleseedproject/pseudputclea.html (It’s an encyclopedia)
*Disclaimer - This report was written by a student participaring in a microbiology course at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. The accuracy of the contents of this report is not guaranteed and it is recommended that you seek additional sources of information to verify the contents.
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