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Pa­loma Gar­rido Amador

Microbial Physiology Research Group

MPI for Marine Microbiology
Celsiusstr. 1
D-28359 Bremen
Germany

Room: 

3137

Phone: 

+49 421 2028-6530

Paloma Garrido Amador

Nitric ox­ide (NO) is a free rad­ical gas with im­port­ant func­tions in cell bio­logy and at­mo­spheric chem­istry. Due to its high re­act­iv­ity and its in­ter­ac­tions with other rad­ic­als, NO is a very po­tent toxin that can in­hibit mi­cro­bial growth. For this reason, many bac­teria de­tox­ify NO em­ploy­ing an ar­ray of pro­teins to either re­duce it or ox­id­ize it to less re­act­ive com­pounds. In some groups of bac­teria, NO is util­ized as a sig­nal­ing mo­lecule, reg­u­lat­ing pro­cesses such as biofilm form­a­tion and dis­persal, motil­ity and quorum sens­ing. NO is also a key in­ter­me­di­ate of vari­ous mi­cro­bial ni­tro­gen turnover pro­cesses, in­clud­ing de­ni­tri­fic­a­tion, aer­obic am­mo­nia and an­aer­obic am­monium ox­id­a­tion, and even ni­trite-de­pend­ent an­aer­obic meth­ane ox­id­a­tion by meth­an­o­trophic bac­teria. Since NO is present in cells at very low con­cen­tra­tions, trans­formed very rap­idly, and toxic, its dir­ect use for mi­cro­bial res­pir­a­tion has been largely over­looked.

My re­search fo­cuses on mi­croor­gan­isms that can ob­tain en­ergy from NO trans­form­a­tions. Us­ing con­tinu­ous and fed-batch biore­act­ors and samples from nat­ural and en­gin­eered en­vir­on­ments, my ob­ject­ive is to dis­cover and de­scribe en­ergy-con­serving bio­chem­ical re­ac­tions in­volving NO, as well as the mi­croor­gan­isms and the en­zymes in­volved.

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