The Membrane Adaptivity of Cyanobacteria in the Presence of Normal Chain Alcohols

Abstract

The ability to adapt to environmental conditions is a fundamental property of living organisms. The adaptive ability of a cell membrane has been studied extensively in E. coli bacterial cells. This experiment focused on cyanobacterial cells and their ability to adapt to changes in temperature and solvent concentrations. In the experiments described here, growth of cyanobacterial cells in different temperatures was shown to affect the observed lag time and the growth rate. Addition of normal chain alcohols was shown to affect both the growth rate and the lipid composition. The results indicated that during growth in the presence of methanol, the saturated fatty acids palmitic and capric acid both increased in the cell membrane. Similar fatty acid changes were observed in E.coli by Sullivan et al.(1S); however, this was the first demonstration of this phenomenon in cyanobacterial cells. The observed changes in the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fatty acid in the presence of alcohols were very similar to the ratio changes found previously with varying temperatures (9). This suggests that alcohols mimic the changes in membrane structure brought about by a change in temperature (15). The data from this experiment do not attempt to explain what mechanism caused the alcohol adaptation; however, they did demonstrate that in the presence of methanol the saturated to unsaturated fatty acid ratio did increase.