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Highly Persistent Strains of Hydrocarbon-Oxidizing Bacteria as a Base for Increasing the Viable Cell Numbers during Long-Term Storage

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Abstract—

Due to frequent and large-scale oil spills, increasing the stability of biopreparations with hydrocarbon-oxidizing bacteria (HOB), which are used for bioremediation of oil-contaminated environmental objects, is presently an important task. In the present work, a new approach for maintaining the viable HOB cell titer under unfavorable storage conditions (oxygen availability at 18−24°C) was developed, which implies constructing a strain with increased number of persister cells (High Persistence Strain, HPS). The HPS of a HOB bacterium Acinetobacter seifertii WS1 was obtained by antibiotic selection with ciprofloxacin. The share of persister cells in the population increased after 13 sequential selection cycles from 1.2 to 52%. Several months of storage of the A. seifertii HPS resulted in 2−4 times better survival than in the control. The new strain retained ability to produce high numbers of persister cells after numerous transfers without antibiotic selection. The rate of oil oxidation by the HPS culture after 4-month storage was 2−4 times higher than in the control culture. The developed approach to increasing the viable cell titer of long-term-stored cells has not been applied previously and may be used in ecobiotechnology.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 18-29-05009/18, and, in part, by the State Assignment of the Russian Federation Ministry of Education and Science for the Federal Research Center of Biotechnology, Russian Academy of Sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology, Research Centre of Biotechnology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 119071, Moscow, Russia

    Yu. A. Nikolaev, N. G. Loiko, E. V. Demkina, I. A. Borzenkov, T. A. Kanapatskii & G. I. El’-Registan

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  1. Yu. A. Nikolaev
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  2. N. G. Loiko
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  3. E. V. Demkina
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  4. I. A. Borzenkov
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  5. T. A. Kanapatskii
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  6. G. I. El’-Registan
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Correspondence to Yu. A. Nikolaev.

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Conflict of interest. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Statement on the welfare of animals. This article does not contain any studies involving animals or human participants performed by any of the authors.

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Translated by E. Babchenko

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Nikolaev, Y.A., Loiko, N.G., Demkina, E.V. et al. Highly Persistent Strains of Hydrocarbon-Oxidizing Bacteria as a Base for Increasing the Viable Cell Numbers during Long-Term Storage. Microbiology 90, 868–872 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0026261721060126

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0026261721060126

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