Comprehensive insights on environmental adaptation strategies in Antarctic bacteria and biotechnological applications of cold adapted molecules

Abstract

Climate change and the induced environmental disturbances is one of the major threats that have a strong impact on bacterial communities in the Antarctic environment. To cope with the persistent extreme environment and inhospitable conditions, psychrophilic bacteria are thriving and displaying striking adaptive characteristics towards severe external factors including freezing temperature, sea ice, high radiation and salinity which indicates their potential in regulating climate change’s environmental impacts. The review illustrates the different adaptation strategies of Antarctic microbes to changing climate factors at the structural, physiological and molecular level. Moreover, we discuss the recent developments in “omics” approaches to reveal polar “blackbox” of psychrophiles in order to gain a comprehensive picture of bacterial communities. The psychrophilic bacteria synthesize distinctive cold-adapted enzymes and molecules that have many more industrial applications than mesophilic ones in biotechnological industries. Hence, the review also emphasizes on the biotechnological potential of psychrophilic enzymes in different sectors and suggests the machine learning approach to study cold–adapted bacteria and engineering the industrially important enzymes for sustainable bioeconomy.

Immobilized cold-active enzymes onto magnetic chitosan microparticles as a highly stable and reusable carrier for p-xylene biodegradation

“…According to Supplementary Table S2, XMO and C1,2D showed the highest number of total peptide hits, affirming their identification, and indicating their high abundance in the crude enzyme mixture. Although recent developments in proteomics along with gene expression profiling have been coupled to discover numerous biomolecules in psychrophilic bacteria (Ramasamy et al, 2023), no studies have been conducted on proteomic profiling of cell lysate containing cold-active enzymes for the biodegradation of contaminants. For example, a proteomic study conducted on Pseudoalteromonas haloplanktis TAC125 isolated from Antarctica at 4 °C and 18 °C, showed that most of the proteins expressed at 4 °C were heat shock proteins associated with folding (Piette et al, 2011).…”

Maize residue retention shapes soil microbial communities and co-occurrence networks upon freeze-thawing cycles

“…Especially, the fungal network in severe FT treatment harbored the most abundant keystone taxa. Among these keystone taxa, Pseudogymnoascus roseus and Pseudeurotium hygrophilum were reported to be cold-adapted fungi ( Ramasamy et al, 2023 ), and thereby may stabilize fungal network under repeated severe FT.…”

Biosynthetic gene clusters with biotechnological applications in novel Antarctic isolates from Actinomycetota

“…Actinomycetota, in particular, has been the subject of great attention in Antarctica because of their ability to produce secondary metabolites with pharmacological and biotechnological properties (Oyedoh et al 2023) (Reis-Mansur et al 2019). In recent years, Antarctic bacteria have been found to produce plant growth promoters, pigments, bioremediation agents, bioactive compounds, antibiofilm agents, nanoparticles, and enzymes for the food industry (Styczynski et al 2022;Ramasamy et al 2023).…”