Development of a markerless gene replacement system for Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans and construction of a pfkB mutant.

The extremely acidophilic, chemolithoautotrophic Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans is an important bioleaching bacterium of great value in the metallurgical industry and environmental protection. In this report, a mutagenesis system based on the homing endonuclease I-SceI was developed to produce targeted, unmarked gene deletions in the strain A. ferrooxidans ATCC 23270. A targeted phosphofructokinase (PFK) gene (pfkB) mutant of A. ferrooxidans ATCC 23270 was constructed by homologous recombination and identified by PCR with specific primers as well as Southern blot analysis. This potential pfkB gene (AFE_1807) was also characterized by expression in PFK-deficient Escherichia coli cells, and heteroexpression of the PFKB protein demonstrated that it had functional PFK activity, though it was significantly lower (about 800-fold) than that of phosphofructokinase-2 (PFK-B) expressed by the pfkB gene from E. coli K-12. The function of the potential PFKB protein in A. ferrooxidans was demonstrated by comparing the properties of the pfkB mutant with those of the wild type. The pfkB mutant strain displayed a relatively reduced growth capacity in S(0) medium (0.5% [wt/vol] elemental sulfur in 9K basal salts solution adjusted to pH 3.0 with H(2)SO(4)), but the mutation did not completely prevent A. ferrooxidans from assimilating exogenous glucose. The transcriptional analysis of some related genes in central carbohydrate metabolism in the wild-type and mutant strains with or without supplementation of glucose was carried out by quantitative reverse transcription-PCR. This report suggests that the markerless mutagenesis strategy could serve as a model for functional studies of other genes of interest from A. ferrooxidans and multiple mutations could be made in a single A. ferrooxidans strain.