Morphological Changes and Oxidative Stress in Actinobacteria during Removal of Heavy Metals

Abstract

Heavy metal pollution is one the most serious environmental problems facing our planet today and immediate solutions are needed to tackle it. Heavy metals such as copper (Cu) and chromium (Cr) play an important role as trace elements in biochemical reactions but these metals are toxic at higher concentrations.Cu is a very versatile heavy metal, able to cycle between two redox states, oxidized Cu(II) and reduced Cu(I), with Cu(I) being highly unstable. All living organisms require Cu as a catalytic cofactor for basic biological process such as the respiration (Puig and Thiele 2002); however, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells possess homeostatic mechanisms to regulate the concentration of Cu and minimize the toxic effects produced by excessive levels of the same.