Pseudomonas putida

Pseudomonas putida is a gram-negative rod-shaped saprotrophic soil bacterium. Based on 16S rRNA analysis, P. putida has been placed in the P. putida group, to which it lends its name.

It is the first patented organism in the world. Because it is a living organism the patent was disputed and brought before the United States Supreme Court in the historic court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty which the inventor, Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, won. It demonstrates a very diverse metabolism, including the ability to degrade organic solvents such as toluene. This ability has been put to use in bioremediation, or the use of microorganisms to biodegrade oil. Use of P. putida is preferable to some other Pseudomonas species capable of such degradation as it is a safe species of bacteria, unlike P. aeruginosa for example, which is an opportunistic human pathogen.

Bioremediation
The diverse metabolism of P. putida may be exploited for bioremediation; for example, it is used as a soil inoculant to remedy naphthalene contaminated soils.

P. putida is capable of converting styrene oil into the biodegradable plastic PHA. This may be of use in the effective recycling of Polystyrene foam, otherwise thought to be non-biodegradable.

Biocontrol
P. putida has demonstrated potential biocontrol properties, as an effective antagonist of damping off diseases such as Pythium and Fusarium.

Oligonucleotide Usage Signatures of the Pseudomonas putida KT2440 Genome
Di- to pentanucleotide usage and the list of the most abundant octa- to tetradecanucleotides are useful measures of the bacterial genomic signature. The Pseudomonas putida KT2440 chromosome is characterized by strand symmetry and intra-strand parity of complementary oligonucleotides. Each tetranucleotide occurs with similar frequency on the two strands. Tetranucleotide usage is biased by G+C content and physicochemical constraints such as base stacking energy, dinucleotide propeller twist angle or trinucleotide bendability. The 105 regions with atypical oligonucleotide composition can be differentiated by their patterns of oligonucleotide usage into categories of horizontally acquired gene islands, multidomain genes or ancient regions such as genes for ribosomal proteins and RNAs. A species-specific extragenic palindromic sequence is the most common repeat in the genome that can be exploited for the typing of P. putida strains. In the coding sequence of P. putida LLL is the most abundant tripeptide.

Organic Synthesis
Certain variants of P. putida have been used in organic synthesis, the first example being the oxidation of benzene, employed by Prof. S. V. Ley in the synthesis of the cyclitol (+/-)pinitol.

CBB5 and caffeine consumption
Pseudomonas putida CBB5 can live on pure caffeine and has been observed to break caffeine down into carbon dioxide and ammonia.