MURFREESBORO — Middle
Tennessee State University and Tennessee Technological University student and
faculty researchers have discovered two new species of bacteria found in a
cooling tower and hot tub in Putnam County, Tennessee.
And the discovery may provide clues to new pathways of disease
and treatment, said the lead scientists, whose nearly 20-year research endeavor
has been published in Genome Announcements (January 2016) and the International
Journal of Systematic Microbiology) in February.
To view video of the researchers discussing their findings,
visit
https://youtu.be/f6UH42rrc4I.
Including nearly $1 million in U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency grant funding, MTSU and Tennessee Tech researchers and students used a
variety of microscopic and genomic techniques to describe these organisms,
which have been named “Candidatus
Berkiella aquae” and “Candidatus Berkiella cookevillensis.”
MTSU professor Mary Farone named them in honor of the city
of Cookeville, where the cooling tower and hot tub were located, and for Dr.
Sharon Berk, a Tennessee Tech researcher for 27 years, who is now an MTSU
senior scientist writing grant proposals for research for the Office of
Research and Sponsored Programs.
“We are hoping that the genetic assessments will lead to how
it’s getting into the nucleus and maybe using that to figure out how to take
things into a cancer cell that you want to target, that would be the ultimate
good thing about it,” said Berk.
“The significance of this work is we’re finding new
organisms in cooling towers and in constructed environments like hot tubs and
showers, but primarily in cooling towers,” Berk added.
In addition to Cookeville, researchers not only took samples
from cooling towers primarily in Sparta, Tennessee, and Murfreesboro, but also
from Texas and New Jersey.
Through the years, about 15 Tennessee Tech undergraduate and
graduate students and more than a dozen MTSU grad and undergraduate students
assisted with the research in on-campus laboratories and locations where
bacteria samples were collected.
Although pneumonia is the leading reason for adult
hospitalization in the U.S., a cause for pneumonia is detected in less than 40
percent of the cases, Farone said.
“Neither of the new bacteria are currently associated with respiratory
disease as far as we know, but their small size, location in the nucleus and
failure to grow by conventional laboratory methods may prevent their
detection,” Farone said. “However, their unusual movement into and replication
to large numbers in the cell nucleus represents a novel bacterial cause of cell
death.”
Although other bacteria have been shown to infect the nuclei
of certain cells, the new bacteria reproduce to high numbers in the nucleus,
killing host cells (including in one case, human cancer cells) in less than
five days, Farone said.
“Amoebae are the organisms also responsible for transmission
of bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ disease, a pneumonia illness first
described in 1976,” Farone said. “Although the bacteria responsible for
Legionnaires’ disease do not infect the cell nucleus but divide in cytoplasm of
human cells, genomic analysis shows these two newly described intranuclear
bacteria share some of the same disease-causing genes with Legionnaires’
disease bacteria.”
Farone, Berk and the other lead researchers’ findings are
significant considering recent deadly outbreaks in New York City and Flint,
Michigan, that were associated with human-constructed water systems such as
cooling towers.
Berk (at Tech and MTSU), Mary and Anthony Farone and Anthony
Newsome at MTSU and Tennessee Tech biology associate professor John Gunderson
played vital roles in the study.
At MTSU, former grad student Yohannes Mehari and molecular
bioscience doctoral candidate Brock Arivett have proven to be invaluable in the
research experience.
“Hopefully, this will be important for us to be able to
determine the way to transport things into the nucleus for future studies,”
Arivett said.
The project began with an ecological study of amoebae and
bacteria in natural versus human-constructed environments.
The TTU Center for the Management, Utilization and
Protection of Water Resources (the Water Center) and MTSU provided support in
addition to many Cookeville and Murfreesboro businesses, which agreed to
provide water samples.
No comments:
Post a Comment