Anaerobic HgII reduction is driven by cellular HgII-thiol interactions
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Redox reactions play a critical role in determining the availability of mercury species, Hg II and Hg 0 , to anaerobic microbes responsible for methylating inorganic mercury into toxic monomethylmercury. Some anaerobes also contribute to Hg cycling in methylation hotspots by reducing Hg II to its gaseous elemental form, Hg 0 . However, their contributions remain poorly quantified due to limited mechanistic insights and the absence of genetic targets. In this study, we investigated the mechanisms of anaerobic Hg II reduction in the versatile anoxygenic photoheterotroph and fermenter Heliomicrobium modesticaldum Ice1. Given Hg II strong electrophilic affinity for thiol groups, we hypothesized that cellular thiols are key interaction sites mediating Hg II reduction. Exposure of H. modesticaldum to the thiol-alkylating agent N -ethylmaleimide (NEM), which irreversibly binds thiols, resulted in a concentration-dependent inhibition of Hg 0 production during both photoheterotrophy and fermentation. Hg partitioning assays with Escherichia coli cells revealed no significant differences in Hg-cell partitioning in the presence or absence of NEM, suggesting that Hg II reduction is dependent on intracellular thiol interactions. These findings highlight the importance of thiol-mediated pathways in Heliobacterial Hg II reduction. Although the exact cellular components remain unidentified, we discuss potential thiol-containing coupling sites that warrant further investigation.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it