Groundwater contaminant plumes from recent accidental gasoline releases often contain the fuel oxygenate MTBE (methyl tert-butyl ether) together with BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, o-xylene, m-xylene and p-xylene) compounds. This study evaluates substrate interactions during the aerobic biotransformation of MTBE and BTEX mixtures by a pure culture, PM1, capable of utilizing MTBE for growth. PM1 was unable to degrade ethylbenzene and two of the xylene isomers at concentrations of 20 mg/L following culture growth on MTBE. In addition, the presence of 20 mg/L of ethylbenzene or the xylenes in mixtures with MTBE completely inhibited MTBE degradation. When MTBE-grown cells of PM1 were exposed to MTBE/benzene and MTBE/toluene mixtures, MTBE degradation proceeded, while the degradation of benzene and toluene was delayed for several hours. Following this initial lag, benzene and toluene were degraded rapidly, while the rate of MTBE degradation slowed significantly. MTBE degradation did not increase to previous rates until benzene and toluene were almost entirely degraded. The lag in benzene and toluene degradation was presumably due to the induction of the enzymes necessary for BTEX degradation. Once these enzymes were induced, sequential additions of benzene or toluene were degraded rapidly, and growth on benzene and toluene was observed. The results of this study suggest that BTEX and MTBE degradation occurs primarily via two independent and inducible pathways. If subsurface microbial communities behave similarly to the culture used in this study, the observed severe inhibition of MTBE degradation by ethylbenzene and the xylenes and the partial inhibition by benzene and toluene suggest thatthe biodegradation of MTBE in subsurface environments would most likely be delayed until MTBE has migrated beyond the BTEX plume.

A Gram-negative, rod-shaped, motile, non-pigmented, facultative aerobe that grew optimally at pH 6?5 and 30 6C (strain PM1 T ) was isolated for its ability to completely degrade the gasoline additive methyl tert-butyl ether. Analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequence indicated that this bacterium was a member of the class Betaproteobacteria in the Sphaerotilus-Leptothrix group. The 16S rRNA gene sequence identity to other genera in this group, Leptothrix, Aquabacterium, Roseateles, Sphaerotilus, Ideonella and Rubrivivax, ranged from 93 to 96 %. The chemotaxonomic data including Q-8 as the major quinone, C16 : 1v7c and C16 : 0 as the major fatty acids and a DNA G+C content of 69 mol%, support the inclusion of strain PM1 T in the classBetaproteobacteria. It differed from other members of the Sphaerotilus-Leptothrix group by being a facultative methylotroph that used methanol as a sole carbon source, and by also being able to grow heterotrophically in defined media containing ethanol, toluene, benzene, ethylbenzene and dihydroxybenzoates as sole carbon sources. On the basis of the morphological, physiological, biochemical and genetic information, a new genus and species, Methylibium petroleiphilum gen. nov., sp. nov., is proposed, with PM1 T (=ATCC BAA-1232 T =LMG 22953 T ) as the type strain.Organisms that can use one-carbon compounds as energy sources are called methylotrophs (Lidstrom, 2001). A subset of this group, the methanotrophs, can use methane as their sole carbon source. Methylotrophs have been extensively studied because of their potential use in biotechnology and bioremediation (Lidstrom & Stirling, 1990;Hanson & Hanson, 1996). The aerobic methylotrophs have representatives in the Proteobacteria, high-G+C and low-G+C Gram-positive bacteria that have been isolated from diverse environments. Within the Proteobacteria, the majority of the methylotrophs that have been isolated belong to either the Alphaproteobacteria or Gammaproteobacteria. Three genera, Methylobacillus (Urakami & Komagata, 1986), Methylophilus (Jenkins et al., 1987) and Methylovorus (Govorukhina & Trotsenko, 1991), in the class Betaproteobacteria are considered to be restricted facultative methylotrophs because they can use methanol but not methane as a sole carbon source, and can use only a limited number of other carbon sources such as glucose and fructose. Phylogenetic analysis based on their 16S rRNA gene sequence resulted in all of them being grouped in the order Methylophilales (Bratina et al., 1992;Garrity & Holt, 2001). Currently, none of the described methanotrophs belong to the class Betaproteobacteria. However, comparison of the 16S rRNA gene sequence indicated that isolate PM1T was most closely related to the class Betaproteobacteria in the SphaerotilusLeptothrix group (Bruns et al., 2001). In this study, morphological, physiological, biochemical and genetic information is used to propose a new genus and species, Methylibium petroleiphilum gen. nov., sp. nov. Strain PM1T was isolated from a mixed bacterial culture enriched with m...

A bacterial strain, PM1, which is able to utilize methyltert-butyl ether (MTBE) as its sole carbon and energy source, was isolated from a mixed microbial consortium in a compost biofilter capable of degrading MTBE. Initial linear rates of MTBE degradation by 2 × 106 cells ml−1 were 0.07, 1.17, and 3.56 μg ml−1 h−1 for initial concentrations of 5, 50, and 500 μg MTBE ml−1, respectively. When incubated with 20 μg of uniformly labeled [14C]MTBE ml−1, strain PM1 converted 46% to14CO2 and 19% to 14C-labeled cells within 120 h. This yield is consistent with the measurement of protein accumulation at different MTBE concentrations from which was estimated a biomass yield of 0.18 mg of cells mg MTBE−1. Strain PM1 was inoculated into sediment core material collected from a contaminated groundwater plume at Port Hueneme, California, in which there was no evidence of MTBE degradation. Strain PM1 readily degraded 20 μg of MTBE ml−1 added to the core material. The rate of MTBE removal increased with additional inputs of 20 μg of MTBE ml−1. These results suggest that PM1 has potential for use in the remediation of MTBE-contaminated environments.

The gasoline additive MTBE, methyl tert-butyl ether, is a widespread and persistent groundwater contaminant. MTBE undergoes rapid mineralization as the sole carbon and energy source of bacterial strain PM1, isolated from an enrichment culture of compost biofilter material. In this report, we describe the results of microbial community DNA profiling to assess the relative dominance of isolate PM1 and other bacterial strains cultured from the compost enrichment. Three polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based profiling approaches were evaluated: denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) analysis of 230 bp 16S rDNA fragments; thermal gradient gel electrophoresis (TGGE) analysis of 575 bp 16S rDNA fragments; and non-denaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of 300-1,500 bp fragments containing 16S/23S ribosomal intergenic transcribed spacer (ITS) regions. Whereas all three DNA profiling approaches indicated that PM1-like bands predominated in mixtures from MTBE-grown enrichments, ITS profiling provided the most abundant and specific sequence data to confirm strain PM1's presence in the enrichment. Moreover, ITS profiling did not produce non-specific PCR products that were observed with T/DGGE. A further advantage of ITS community profiling over other methods requiring restriction digestion (e.g. terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms) was that it did not require an additional digestion step or the use of automated sequencing equipment. ITS bands, excised from similar locations in profiles of the enrichment and PM1 pure culture, were 99.9% identical across 750 16S rDNA positions and 100% identical across 691 spacer positions. BLAST comparisons of nearly full-length 16S rDNA sequences showed 96% similarity between isolate PM1 and representatives of at least four different genera in the Leptothrix subgroup of the beta-Proteobacteria (Aquabacterium, Leptothrix, Rubrivivax and Ideonella). Maximum likelihood and parsimony analyses of 1,249 nucleotide positions supported isolate PM1's position in a separate lineage within the Leptothrix subgroup.

Phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) analysis of a soil microbial community was coupled with 13C isotope tracer analysis to measure the community’s response to addition of 35 μg of [13C]toluene ml of soil solution−1. After 119 h of incubation with toluene, 96% of the incorporated13C was detected in only 16 of the total 59 PLFAs (27%) extracted from the soil. Of the total 13C-enriched PLFAs, 85% were identical to the PLFAs contained in a toluene-metabolizing bacterium isolated from the same soil. In contrast, the majority of the soil PLFAs (91%) became labeled when the same soil was incubated with [13C]glucose. Our study showed that coupling13C tracer analysis with PLFA analysis is an effective technique for distinguishing a specific microbial population involved in metabolism of a labeled substrate in complex environments such as soil.