Glyphosate is one of the most widely used herbicides
worldwide.
Unfortunately, the continuous use of glyphosate has resulted in serious
environmental contamination and raised public concern about its impact
on human health. In our previous study, Chryseobacterium sp. Y16C was isolated and characterized as an efficient degrader
that can completely degrade glyphosate. However, the biochemical and
molecular mechanisms underlying its glyphosate biodegradation ability
remain unclear. In this study, the physiological response of Y16C
to glyphosate stimulation was characterized at the cellular level.
The results indicated that, in the process of glyphosate degradation,
Y16C induced a series of physiological responses in the membrane potential,
reactive oxygen species levels, and apoptosis. The antioxidant system
of Y16C was activated to alleviate the oxidative damage caused by
glyphosate. Furthermore, a novel gene, goW, was expressed
in response to glyphosate. The gene product, GOW, is an enzyme that
catalyzes glyphosate degradation, with putative structural similarities
to glycine oxidase. GOW encodes 508 amino acids, with an isoelectric
point of 5.33 and a molecular weight of 57.2 kDa, which indicates
that it is a glycine oxidase. GOW displays maximum enzyme activity
at 30 °C and pH 7.0. Additionally, most of the metal ions exhibited
little influence on the enzyme activity except for Cu2+. Finally, with glyphosate as the substrate, the catalytic efficiency
of GOW was higher than that of glycine, although opposite results
were observed for the affinity. Taken together, the current study
provides new insights to deeply understand and reveal the mechanisms
of glyphosate degradation in bacteria.