Anaerobic ammonium-oxidizing (anammox) bacteria defy many microbiological concepts and share numerous properties with both eukaryotes and archaea. Among their most intriguing characteristics are their compartmentalized cell plan and archaeon-like cell wall. Here we review our current knowledge about anammox cell biology. The anammox cell is divided into three separate compartments by bilayer me...

Despite the high relevance of anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) for nitrogen loss from marine systems, its relative importance compared to denitrification has less been studied in freshwater ecosystems, and our knowledge is especially scarce for groundwater. Surprisingly, phospholipid fatty acids (PLFA)-based studies identified zones with potentially active anammox bacteria within two supe...

Anaerobic ammonium-oxidizing (anammox) planctomycetes oxidize ammonium in the absence of molecular oxygen with nitrite as the electron acceptor. Although planctomycetes are generally assumed to lack peptidoglycan in their cell walls, recent genome data imply that the anammox bacteria have the genes necessary to synthesize peptidoglycan-like cell wall structures. In this study, we investigated t...

Identification of anaerobic ammonium oxidizing (anammox) bacteria by molecular tools aimed at the evaluation of bacterial diversity in autotrophic nitrogen removal systems is limited by the difficulty to design universal primers for the Bacteria domain able to amplify the anammox 16S rRNA genes. A metagenomic analysis (pyrosequencing) of total bacterial diversity including anammox population in...

In many oceanic regions, growth of phytoplankton is nitrogen-limited because fixation of N2 cannot make up for the removal of fixed inorganic nitrogen (NH4+, NO2-, and NO3-) by anaerobic microbial processes. Globally, 30-50% of the total nitrogen loss occurs in oxygen-minimum zones (OMZs) and is commonly attributed to denitrification (reduction of nitrate to N2 by heterotrophic bacteria). Here,...

The distribution of anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) in nature has been addressed by only a few environmental studies, and our understanding of how anammox bacteria compete for substrates in natural environments is therefore limited. In this study, we measure the potential anammox rates in sediment from four locations in a subtropical tidal river system. Porewater profiles of NO(x)(-) (NO...

Research was conducted to develop process applications for anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) bacteria acclimated to animal wastewater conditions using microbial immobilization techniques. In the anammox reaction, under anaerobic and autotrophic conditions, ammonium (NH4) serves as the electron donor using nitrite (NO2) as the electron acceptor resulting in production of harmless di-nitroge...

Oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) in the ocean are of key importance for pelagic fixed-nitrogen loss (N-loss) through microbial denitrification and anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox). Recent studies document that zooplankton is surprisingly abundant in and around OMZs and that the microbial community associated with carcasses of a large copepod species mediates denitrification. Here, we investiga...

Anaerobic ammonium oxidizing (anammox) bacterial community structures were investigated in surface (1-2 cm) and lower (20-21 cm) layers of mangrove sediments at sites located immediately to the mangrove trees (S0), 10 m (S1) and 1000 m (S2) away from mangrove trees in a polluted area of the Pearl River Delta. At S0, both 16S rRNA and hydrazine oxidoreductase (HZO) encoding genes of anammox bact...