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Escherichia coli Can Eat DNA as an Excellent Nitrogen Source to Grow Quickly
Is DNA or RNA a good nutrient? Although scientists have raised this question for dozens of years, few textbooks mention the nutritional role of nucleic acids. Paradoxically, mononucleotides are widely added to infant formula milk and animal feed. Interestingly, competent bacteria can bind and ingest...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9273947/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35836416 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2022.894849 |
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author | Huang, Lili Zhang, Yehui Du, Xinmei An, Ran Liang, Xingguo |
author_facet | Huang, Lili Zhang, Yehui Du, Xinmei An, Ran Liang, Xingguo |
author_sort | Huang, Lili |
collection | PubMed |
description | Is DNA or RNA a good nutrient? Although scientists have raised this question for dozens of years, few textbooks mention the nutritional role of nucleic acids. Paradoxically, mononucleotides are widely added to infant formula milk and animal feed. Interestingly, competent bacteria can bind and ingest extracellular DNA and even integrate it into their genome. These results prompt us to clarify whether bacteria can “eat” DNA as food. We found that Escherichia coli can grow well in the medium with DNA as carbon and nitrogen sources. More interestingly, in the presence of glucose and DNA, bacteria grew more rapidly, showing that bacteria can use DNA as an excellent nitrogen source. Surprisingly, the amount of DNA in the culture media decreased but its length remained unchanged, demonstrating that E. coli ingested long DNA directly. The gene expression study shows that E. coli mainly ingests DNA before digestion and digests it in the periplasm. Bifidobacterium bifidum can also use DNA as the nitrogen source for growth, but not efficiently as E. coli. This study is of great significance to study DNA metabolism and utilization in organisms. It also lays a foundation to understand the nutritional function of DNA in intestinal flora and human health. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9273947 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-92739472022-07-13 Escherichia coli Can Eat DNA as an Excellent Nitrogen Source to Grow Quickly Huang, Lili Zhang, Yehui Du, Xinmei An, Ran Liang, Xingguo Front Microbiol Microbiology Is DNA or RNA a good nutrient? Although scientists have raised this question for dozens of years, few textbooks mention the nutritional role of nucleic acids. Paradoxically, mononucleotides are widely added to infant formula milk and animal feed. Interestingly, competent bacteria can bind and ingest extracellular DNA and even integrate it into their genome. These results prompt us to clarify whether bacteria can “eat” DNA as food. We found that Escherichia coli can grow well in the medium with DNA as carbon and nitrogen sources. More interestingly, in the presence of glucose and DNA, bacteria grew more rapidly, showing that bacteria can use DNA as an excellent nitrogen source. Surprisingly, the amount of DNA in the culture media decreased but its length remained unchanged, demonstrating that E. coli ingested long DNA directly. The gene expression study shows that E. coli mainly ingests DNA before digestion and digests it in the periplasm. Bifidobacterium bifidum can also use DNA as the nitrogen source for growth, but not efficiently as E. coli. This study is of great significance to study DNA metabolism and utilization in organisms. It also lays a foundation to understand the nutritional function of DNA in intestinal flora and human health. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-06-28 /pmc/articles/PMC9273947/ /pubmed/35836416 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2022.894849 Text en Copyright © 2022 Huang, Zhang, Du, An and Liang. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Microbiology Huang, Lili Zhang, Yehui Du, Xinmei An, Ran Liang, Xingguo Escherichia coli Can Eat DNA as an Excellent Nitrogen Source to Grow Quickly |
title | Escherichia coli Can Eat DNA as an Excellent Nitrogen Source to Grow Quickly |
title_full | Escherichia coli Can Eat DNA as an Excellent Nitrogen Source to Grow Quickly |
title_fullStr | Escherichia coli Can Eat DNA as an Excellent Nitrogen Source to Grow Quickly |
title_full_unstemmed | Escherichia coli Can Eat DNA as an Excellent Nitrogen Source to Grow Quickly |
title_short | Escherichia coli Can Eat DNA as an Excellent Nitrogen Source to Grow Quickly |
title_sort | escherichia coli can eat dna as an excellent nitrogen source to grow quickly |
topic | Microbiology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9273947/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35836416 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2022.894849 |
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