Low-Concentration Kinetics of Atmospheric CH4 Oxidation in Soil and Mechanism of NH4+ Inhibition

• Main Authors: Gulledge, Jay, Schimel, Joshua P.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: American Society for Microbiology 1998
• Subjects: General Microbial Ecology; taiga
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC106641; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9797279

NH4+ inhibition kinetics for CH4 oxidation were examined at near-atmospheric CH4 concentrations in three upland forest soils. Whether NH4+-independent salt effects could be neutralized by adding nonammoniacal salts to control samples in lieu of deionized water was also investigated. Because the levels of exchangeable endogenous NH4+ were very low in the three soils, desorption of endogenous NH4+ was not a significant factor in this study. The Km(app) values for water-treated controls were 9.8, 22, and 57 nM for temperate pine, temperate hardwood, and birch taiga soils, respectively. At CH4 concentrations of ≤15 μl liter−1, oxidation followed first-order kinetics in the fine-textured taiga soil, whereas the coarse-textured temperate soils exhibited Michaelis-Menten kinetics. Compared to water controls, the Km(app) values in the temperate soils increased in the presence of NH4+ salts, whereas the Vmax(app) values decreased substantially, indicating that there was a mixture of competitive and noncompetitive inhibition mechanisms for whole NH4+ salts. Compared to the corresponding K+ salt controls, the Km(app) values for NH4+ salts increased substantially, whereas the Vmax(app) values remained virtually unchanged, indicating that NH4+ acted by competitive inhibition. Nonammoniacal salts caused inhibition to increase with increasing CH4 concentrations in all three soils. In the birch taiga soil, this trend occurred with both NH4+ and K+ salts, and the slope of the increase was not affected by the addition of NH4+. Hence, the increase in inhibition resulted from an NH4+-independent mechanism. These results show that NH4+ inhibition of atmospheric CH4 oxidation resulted from enzymatic substrate competition and that additional inhibition that was not competitive resulted from a general salt effect that was independent of NH4+.