PubMed · 2026-05-29
Bacteria have evolved sophisticated genetic toolkits to manage metals in soil and water — detoxifying toxic ones like arsenic and mercury while carefully balancing essential ones like zinc and copper. This review maps out how those systems are organized and how they could be engineered for cleaning up contaminated environments.
Bacteria maintain precise internal 'set points' for essential metals like copper and zinc through coordinated uptake, storage, and export systems organized as operons.
Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria use fundamentally different strategies: Gram-negatives chain together compartmental 'handoff' systems across their double membrane, while Gram-positives rely more on inner-membrane export and cell-wall buffering.
Metal-resistance genes are evolutionarily mobile and frequently co-selected alongside antibiotic resistance genes, meaning heavy-metal pollution may be inadvertently driving antibiotic resistance in microbial communities.