Recent concerns over the environmental contamination of water supplies with perchlorate have focused a significant amount of attention on the microbial metabolism of oxyanions of chlorine (29). Perchlorate contamination poses a significant health threat, as preliminary toxicological studies have demonstrated that it is a competitive inhibitor of iodine uptake by the thyroid gland, and at higher concentrations (6 mg per kg of body weight per day), perchlorate can result in fatal bone marrow disease. In 1998, perchlorate was added to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's drinking water candidate contaminant list, and a recommended regulatory concentration of 32 g liter Ϫ1 was set, which, if exceeded, would require stoppage of water usage and remediation (http://cfpub.epa .gov/ncea/cfm/recordisplay.cfm?deid-23292). More recently, as a result of the publication of the first draft of the Environmental Protection Agency review on toxicological and risk characterization data associated with perchlorate contamination, the Californian Department of Health and Human Services revised and lowered its original provisional action level to 4 g liter Ϫ1 , which is at the limits of detection using current technologies (32; http://www.dhs.ca.gov/ps/ddwem/chemicals /perchl/actionlevel.htm).Remediation efforts of perchlorate contamination have focused primarily on microbial processes because of the unique chemical stability and high solubility of perchlorate (29). These processes are based on the ability of perchlorate-reducing bacteria to utilize perchlorate as a physiological electron acceptor in the absence of oxygen and reduce it completely to innocuous chloride. Although it has been recognized for more than 70 years that oxyanions of chlorine are suitable electron acceptors for microbial metabolism (5), this reductive process was originally associated with nitrate-respiring organisms which simply used chlorate as an opportunistic substrate for nitrate reductase (12-14). Growth was not associated with this metabolic pathway, and chlorite was formed as a toxic end product (12)(13)(14)23).It is now known that specialized microorganisms have evolved that can grow by the anaerobic dissimilation of perchlorate (1,6,9,10,18,19,22,24,28,31), and many dissimilatory perchlorate-reducing bacteria (DPRB) are now in pure culture. The known DPRB isolates represent a broad physiology and phylogeny, with members in the alpha, beta, gamma, and epsilon subclasses of the Proteobacteria (9, 31). The majority of the DPRB are members of the beta subclass of the Proteobacteria and represent two novel genera, the Dechloromonas species and the Dechlorosoma species (1). These organisms are closely related to each other and to the phototrophic Rhodocyclus species. Members of these two groups have been identified and isolated from nearly all environments screened, including both field samples and ex situ bioreactors treating perchlorate-contaminated wastes (9, 18).Although relatively little is known about the biochemistry of perchlorate reduction, s...