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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, August 2001, p. 3440-3444, Vol. 67, No. 8
0099-2240/01/$04.00+0   DOI: 10.1128/AEM.67.8.3440-3444.2001
Copyright © 2001, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.

Laboratory-Scale Evidence for Lightning-Mediated Gene Transfer in Soil

Sandrine Demanèche,1 Franck Bertolla,1 François Buret,2 Renaud Nalin,3 Alain Sailland,4 Philippe Auriol,2 Timothy M. Vogel,1 and Pascal Simonet1,*

Laboratoire d'Ecologie Microbienne, UMR CNRS 5557, Université Lyon I,1 and Libragen,3 69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France, Centre de Génie Electrique de Lyon, UPRESA CNRS 5005, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, 69131 Ecully Cedex,2 and Aventis Crop Science, 69623 Lyon,4 France

Received 16 January 2001/Accepted 18 May 2001

Electrical fields and current can permeabilize bacterial membranes, allowing for the penetration of naked DNA. Given that the environment is subjected to regular thunderstorms and lightning discharges that induce enormous electrical perturbations, the possibility of natural electrotransformation of bacteria was investigated. We demonstrated with soil microcosm experiments that the transformation of added bacteria could be increased locally via lightning-mediated current injection. The incorporation of three genes coding for antibiotic resistance (plasmid pBR328) into the Escherichia coli strain DH10B recipient previously added to soil was observed only after the soil had been subjected to laboratory-scale lightning. Laboratory-scale lightning had an electrical field gradient (700 versus 600 kV m-1) and current density (2.5 versus 12.6 kA m-2) similar to those of full-scale lightning. Controls handled identically except for not being subjected to lightning produced no detectable antibiotic-resistant clones. In addition, simulated storm cloud electrical fields (in the absence of current) did not produce detectable clones (transformation detection limit, 10-9). Natural electrotransformation might be a mechanism involved in bacterial evolution.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Laboratoire d'Ecologie Microbienne, UMR 5557, Université Lyon I, 43 Blvd. du 11 Novembre 1918, 69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France. Phone: 33 4 72 44 82 89. Fax: 33 4 72 43 12 23. E-mail: simonet{at}biomserv.univ-lyon1.fr.

Applied and Environmental Microbiology, August 2001, p. 3440-3444, Vol. 67, No. 8
0099-2240/01/$04.00+0   DOI: 10.1128/AEM.67.8.3440-3444.2001
Copyright © 2001, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.


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Copyright © 2001 by the American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.