Journal of Bacteriology, February 2006, p. 829-833, Vol. 188, No. 3
0021-9193/06/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/JB.188.3.829-833.2006
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Received 12 August 2005/ Accepted 2 November 2005
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The combination of hypoxia and nitrate or nitrite induces the major nitrate and nitrite reductases of E. coli, and alternative anaerobic respiratory pathways (e.g., fumarate reductase) are turned off (14). Nitrate/nitrite metabolism generates a mutagenic by-product, the nitrosating agent N2O3 (dinitrogen trioxide, nitrous anhydride). N2O3 can arise either from the condensation of molecular HNO2 or from the autooxidation of NO· (Fig. 1). For the cell's self protection, nitrite levels are kept low by strong nitrite reductase activity and by nitrite efflux pumps, and reactive nitrogen species, if they are at all produced, are kept tightly bound to nitrite reductases during the six-electron reduction of nitrite to ammonia (14). Nevertheless, NO· is detectable in E. coli cell suspensions during nitrate respiration, and its production is dependent on nitrite reductase activity (8).
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FIG. 1. Production of the mutagenic nitrosating agent N2O3 during nitrate/nitrite metabolism in E. coli. NO· is a minor by-product of nitrite reductase activity.
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The present study focuses on the mutagenic nitrosative deamination of DNA bases. It seeks to answer two questions. The first question concerns the proximate source of mutagenic N2O3 during nitrate respiration in E. coli. Is it mainly HNO2 or NO·? There are theoretical arguments for and against each possibility. Nitrite might be favored because it is an obligatory intermediate and a free metabolite, whereas NO· is a by-product. On the other hand, NO· might be favored because it is readily autooxidized to N2O3, whereas the formation of molecular HNO2 from nitrite is very poor at intracellular pH because of the low pK of HNO2. The second question concerns the source of O2 for the formation of N2O3 from NO·. Is it the residual air in the hypoxic cultures, or is it the air to which the cultures are exposed when they are subsequently plated to measure mutation frequencies?
To answer these questions, the present study will make extensive use of an nfi mutant (15) of E. coli. It lacks endonuclease V, a DNA repair enzyme that recognizes hypoxanthine and xanthine in DNA. Although endonuclease V was discovered first in E. coli (12), it is now recognized as part of a superfamily of widely distributed proteins that are found in organisms as diverse as humans and bacteria (1). The enzyme cleaves the second phosphodiester bond 3' to a deaminated purine (16, 30), thereby initiating an excision repair of the mutagenic lesion. Compared to the wild type, nfi mutants have an elevated frequency of A:T
G:C mutations induced by HNO2 (21) or by hypoxic growth in the presence of nitrate or nitrate (28). These properties are consistent with a defect in the repair of deaminated adenine (i.e., hypoxanthine) in DNA, which pairs with cytosine instead of the original thymine. In confirmation of this conclusion, there was no similar mutator effect for a base pair containing 6-methyladenine, which is resistant to nitrosative deamination (21). The unusual susceptibility of an nfi mutant to the mutagenic effects of nitrosating agents will be used in the present study to monitor endogenous nitrosation of DNA.
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nirB was transduced by selection for a linked rpsL (streptomycin resistance) marker and was scored by chemical detection of nitrite utilization, as previously described (6). |
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TABLE 1. E. coli K-12 strains used
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Mutation frequencies. Measurements of lacZ and trpA reversion frequencies, anaerobic growth with sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite, and HNO2 mutagenesis were as previously described (21, 28).
Argon-purged cultures. Cultures containing 100 to 1,000 cells of the nfi mutant BW1506 were grown 20 h at 37°C in 18 ml of LB-glycerol-fumarate medium containing 100 mM NaNO3. The vessels were 22-ml screw-cap vials with polytetrafluoroethylene/silicone septa (Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO). The argon, from which traces of oxygen were removed (13), was bubbled through the culture for 5 min via a hypodermic needle inserted through the septum.
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G:C mutation (9). Anaerobic conditions were attained by growing the cultures in completely filled tubes, without a headspace. The medium contained glycerol as an electron donor. For the sake of the controls in which nitrate and nitrite were absent, fumarate was added to all of the cultures as an alternate electron acceptor. After growth to saturation, the cultures were plated on a lactose minimal medium to score the number of Lac+ revertants. To determine the relative importance of HNO2 or NO· as precursors of N2O3 during nitrate/nitrate metabolism, a
nirB mutation was introduced into an nfi mutant. The nirB deletion affects the major, inducible nitrite reductase of E. coli, which is a cytoplasmic, NADH-dependent enzyme that produces about two-thirds of the detectable free NO· (8); the remainder is generated by a periplasmic cytochrome c nitrite reductase encoded by the nrf genes. During nitrate metabolism, the nirB mutant is expected to accumulate nitrite and HNO2 and to have a corresponding deficit in the production of NO· (Fig. 1). If
nirB increases the mutator effect of nfi, then HNO2 is the cause of nitrosative mutagenesis under these growth conditions; if it decreases the mutator effect, then NO· is the mutagenic agent. The nfi mutant (Fig. 2) demonstrated a nitrate(nitrite)-dependent mutator phenotype, as was previously observed (28). However, the addition of the nirB mutation reduced its mutation frequency almost to the level of the nfi+ strain. The effect of nirB was similar for both nitrate- and nitrite-induced mutagenesis, suggesting that both agents produced DNA damage through a common pathway. The dependence of the mutator effect on nitrite reductase, a potential generator of NO·, implicates NO· rather than HNO2 as the proximate source of N2O3 during nitrate/nitrite metabolism.
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FIG. 2. Reduction of nitrate- and nitrite-induced mutagenesis by a nirB (nitrite reductase) mutation. Cultures were grown anaerobically to saturation in medium containing nitrate or nitrite, and from 2 to 3 x 109 cells from each culture were plated. The strains used were CC106 (wild type), BW1506 (nfi), and BW1590 (nfi nirB). Error bars each represent the standard deviation for nine cultures. Concentrations of nitrite greater than 20 mM were not used because they were lethal (28).
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Source of O2 for N2O3 formation. The production of the nitrosating agent N2O3 from NO· requires O2, but the cultures were incubated anaerobically. There must have been a point in the experiments when both NO· and O2 were present. There are two possibilities for the source of the O2. The first is that the O2 that was dissolved in the medium at the start of the experiment may not have been fully consumed before significant amounts of NO· accumulated in the sealed tubes. The second possibility is that when the cells were plated, O2 in the air reacted with NO· that had accumulated in the anaerobic cultures. The question was resolved by flushing the cultures with O2-free argon either before or after their growth. The results (Table 2) indicated that removing the dissolved oxygen before growth had no significant effect on the mutation frequency. However, when the cultures were flushed with argon after growth, which would remove NO· before exposure to air, the mutation frequency was reduced to that seen without nitrate (as in Fig. 2). Therefore, nitrosative mutagenesis occurs when the bacteria are shifted from nitrate-dependent to oxygen-dependent respiration, during which accumulated NO· may be oxidized to N2O3.
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TABLE 2. Oxygen dependence of nitrate-induced mutagenesis
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To determine whether HNO2 mutagenesis is also mediated by NO·, a nirB mutation was again used. The nirB deletion was tested for its effect on the reversion of the trpA58 allele in the nfi mutant, BW1177. This reversion also occurs by an A:T
G:C transition. A previous study (21) had found that the HNO2-induced reversion of trpA in this strain is nfi dependent (>99.5%) and occurs with a 16-fold-higher frequency than lacZ reversion in our lacZ nfi mutant. Thus, it should be a sensitive indicator of any effect produced by the nirB deletion. The results (Table 3) indicate that the nirB mutation has little, if any, effect on HNO2-induced mutagenesis, suggesting that most HNO2 mutagenesis is not mediated by NO·. There was an additional reason for choosing the trpA58 mutation indicator strain BW1177 for the present study, apart from its high frequency of mutability by HNO2. It has a different genetic background from our lacZ strains and, for unknown reasons that are now under investigation, it does not appear to be significantly mutagenized by nitrate or nitrite in anaerobic cultures (Table 3). However, these conditions of nitrate respiration and HNO2 treatment were previously shown to produce about an equal number of revertants in the lacZ indicator strain BW1506 (21, 28). This result further supports the conclusion that there are different mechanisms for the production of nitrosative DNA damage by HNO2 and by nitrite metabolism. Therefore, during HNO2 treatment, most of the N2O3 is formed directly from HNO2 rather than through its metabolism to NO·.
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TABLE 3. nirB independence of HNO2-induced mutagenesis
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What is the source of the NO·? Unlike the denitrifying bacteria, which reduce nitrite directly to NO·, E. coli appears to reduce nitrite directly to ammonia (2). Nevertheless, several studies (reviewed in reference 8) have documented the production of NO· during nitrate/nitrite metabolism in E. coli. With the aid of a recently available sensitive NO· electrode, it was found that the production of NO· from nitrite by extracts of E. coli could be eliminated by mutations in both the Nrf (periplasmic) and NirB (cytoplasmic) nitrite reductases (8). At the high level of nitrate used in the current study, the expression of Nrf should be repressed, whereas that of NirB should be fully induced (20, 27), thereby explaining why the nirB mutation was effective in preventing most of the nitrosative mutagenesis. However, in early studies with purified NirB, neither NO· nor any other partial reduction product of nitrite was detected (7); hydroxylamine was postulated to be a latent intermediate only because it can serve as a substrate for the enzyme (17). There are no known reactions in E. coli whereby the end product of NirB, ammonia, can be converted to NO·. Therefore, either NO· is a previously undetected latent intermediate that leaks from NirB in very small amounts or else it is the product of a reaction between a cytoplasmic constituent and an NirB-bound intermediate. With the current availability of more sensitive methods of detection, it may be worthwhile to reinvestigate the possibility that traces of NO· may be released from the purified enzyme during the NADH-dependent reduction of nitrite.
There are parallels between oxidative and nitrosative DNA damage. The reactive oxygen species and reactive nitrogen oxides are mostly by-products rather than intermediates of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism, respectively. The reactive oxygen species undergo electron chain reactions in which free radicals generate other free radicals (11). Similarly, N-nitroso derivatives undergo transnitrosation reactions (29). The deleterious nature of the passage from anaerobic nitrate-dependent to oxygen-dependent respiration, as demonstrated in this work, is reminiscent of reperfusion injury, in which reactive oxygen species are produced when mammalian tissues pass from a hypoxic to an aerobic state (3).
Although the present study has demonstrated mutagenesis occurring through a sudden shift in metabolic state, such a shift may not be a necessary prerequisite. Hypoxia rather than anaerobiosis is sufficient for the induction of nitrate and nitrite reductase activities (18). It is possible that when the cell is growing in the presence of nitrate under hypoxic conditions, nitrate and nitrite reductase activities may be sufficiently induced, and there may still be sufficient oxygen present, so that NO· and N2O3 are formed. Thus, nitrosative mutagenesis has been demonstrated in cultures grown to saturation in open flasks (28). There may be many natural environments, perhaps even the human intestine, where these conditions may exist.
This study was supported by NIH grant ES11163.
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