Check out this new paper on nicotine metabolism studies, recently published in the international Biodeterioration and Biodegradation journal by members of the Romanian Society of Bioinformatics.
The group led by Marius Mihasan (Amada El Sabeh & Andreea Mihaela Mleșniță) studies Paenarthrobacter nicotinovorans ATCC 49919 – the reference organism for nicotine degradation via the pyridine pathway, encoded by the 40 putative nic genes located on the native pAO1 catabolic megaplasmid.
Due to its ability to convert toxic nicotine into non-toxic derivatives, the bacterium could become an important biological agent for nicotine decontamination from tobacco waste and polluted natural resources.
However, the interplay between the general metabolism of the bacterial cell and the nicotine degradation pathway encoded by pAO1 is still unexplored.
To bridge these gaps, this study aimed to perform a transcriptomic analysis of nicotine catabolism via the pyridine pathway.
By combining long-read direct RNA-sequencing and nanoLC-MS/MS based proteomic data, this study provides the first multiomic analysis of a bacterial nicotine catabolic pathway and the first multiomic investigation of Paenarthrobacter nicotinovorans ATCC 49919.
You can read the full paper here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibiod.2025.106017
