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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, January 2009, p. 83-92, Vol. 75, No. 1
0099-2240/09/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/AEM.01799-08
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

In Silico Geobacter sulfurreducens Metabolism and Its Representation in Reactive Transport Models {triangledown}

E. L. King,1 K. Tuncay,2 P. Ortoleva,3 and C. Meile1*

Department of Marine Sciences, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602,1 Department of Civil Engineering, Middle East Technical University NCC, Kalkanli, Guzelyurt TRNC, Mersin 10, Turkey,2 Department of Chemistry, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana 474053

Received 4 August 2008/ Accepted 3 November 2008

Microbial activity governs elemental cycling and the transformation of many anthropogenic substances in aqueous environments. Through the development of a dynamic cell model of the well-characterized, versatile, and abundant Geobacter sulfurreducens, we showed that a kinetic representation of key components of cell metabolism matched microbial growth dynamics observed in chemostat experiments under various environmental conditions and led to results similar to those from a comprehensive flux balance model. Coupling the kinetic cell model to its environment by expressing substrate uptake rates depending on intra- and extracellular substrate concentrations, two-dimensional reactive transport simulations of an aquifer were performed. They illustrated that a proper representation of growth efficiency as a function of substrate availability is a determining factor for the spatial distribution of microbial populations in a porous medium. It was shown that simplified model representations of microbial dynamics in the subsurface that only depended on extracellular conditions could be derived by properly parameterizing emerging properties of the kinetic cell model.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Marine Sciences, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-3636. Phone: (706) 542-6549. Fax: (706) 542-5888. E-mail: cmeile{at}uga.edu

{triangledown} Published ahead of print on 14 November 2008.

Applied and Environmental Microbiology, January 2009, p. 83-92, Vol. 75, No. 1
0099-2240/09/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/AEM.01799-08
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.





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