Vibrio natriegens, a review.
When we first started research about V. natriegens, we only came across the latest publications, as well as the original descriptions. Only very tentatively, we became aware of the full body of research that had accumulated since its discovery. In order to make it easier for the scientific community to become familiar with V. natriegens, we thoroughly collected all available publications about it. You can find the complete list of publications on our wiki. The following text is meant to give a first impression about what is known and what has been done so far regarding V. natriegens.
First isolated from salt marsh mud on Sapelo island off the coast of Georgia in 1958 (Payne et al. 1958), the gram-negative bacterium was first named Pseudomonas natriegens (Payne et al. 1960). These early studies also revealed a broad range of tolerated pH conditions with an optimum at a pH of 7.5 (Payne et al. 1960). One feature of this newly discovered organism became immediately apparent: The incredible doubling rate, first determined to be around 9.8 minutes (Eagon 1962). We found that doubling rates of around 7 minutes were possible (own Data).
Only much later, studies found several possible reasons for this. Firstly, as most Vibrio species, V. natriegens genome is split and distributed on two chromosomes. This means that replication can start at two origins of replication (Ori), resulting in more in parallel replication.
Additionally, it was shown that the gamma-proteobacterium has an increased rRNA activity. This is because of a greater number of rRNA operons which are additionally controlled by stronger promoters (Aiyar et al. 2002) when compared to E. coli . More rRNA means more ribosomes since rRNA synthesis has been shown to be the rate-limiting step in their assembly (Miura et al. 1981). Estimates for the number of ribosomes in V. natriegens in the exponential phase suggest around 115,000 per cell, while E. coli is estimated to have between 70,000 and 90,000 (Failmezger et al. 2018).
This gives V. natriegens higher protein expression and lets it create biomass more quickly. Could this also be exploited for the production of high-value proteins? Most likely.
It was soon discovered that V. natriegens would make a perfect example by which to effectively and harmlessly demonstrate the basic techniques of microbiology to students, taking full advantage of the immense doubling rate (Mullenger 1973; Delpech 2001). Experiments regarding population structure, UV stress, and simply bare growth can be observed in a much shorter timeframe.
V. natriegens has a single stage lifecycle and does not form spores. The rod shaped bacterium does however possess a single polar flagella (Austin et al. 1978).