Definition
Bacteria carry out chemical transformations of mercury compounds. Often these transformations result from bacterial resistance systems to inorganic mercury (Hg2+) and to organomercurials (such as methylmercury and phenylmercury). There are four types of mercury-specific proteins: detoxifying enzymes producing less toxic products, membrane transport proteins that bring Hg2+ into the cells to be detoxified, mercury-binding proteins at the outer cell surface, and DNA-binding transcriptional regulatory proteins governing mRNA synthesis (Barkay et al. 2003; Silver and Phung 2005; Silver and Hobman 2007).
Mercury Resistance (the mer Operon)
The genes for bacterial mercury resistance are clustered in a “meroperon” of contiguous genes that are regulated together and are found widely on the plasmids and the chromosomes of both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. The number of genes (and...
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References
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Silver, S., Phung, L.T. (2013). Bacterial Mercury Resistance Proteins. In: Kretsinger, R.H., Uversky, V.N., Permyakov, E.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Metalloproteins. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1533-6_312
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