Molecular evidence for the adaptive evolution of Geobacter sulfurreducens to perform dissimilatory iron reduction in natural environments

What is it about?

Geobacter speices have evolved variety of ways to respire iron oxides. Among them, the conductivity of pili has been thought to be a recently evolved feature and is necessary for iron oxide reduction in Geobacter sulfurreducens. The study reported here constructed the ancestral G. sulfurreducens strain expressing full-length pilin, and demonstrated that the ancestral pilin also can construct conductive pili but can not contribute the extracellular electron transfer to reduce iron oxides.

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