Evidence that the Kuenenia stuttgartiensis encapsulin does not protect against NO damage

A paradigm shift is underway in microbiology: many prokaryotes, long considered to lack the compartmentalization present in all eukaryotic life, have been found to possess a great diversity of protein based intracellular compartments. Notably, the genomes of many marine and freshwater anaerobic ammonium oxidizing (anammox) bacteria encode one of these compartmentalization strategies; encapsulin nanocompartments. These systems’ structure suggests a role for anammox encapsulins in the anammox metabolism, a process of global biogeochemical significance, which results in the loss of biologically available nitrogen from aquatic environments. Here we test if the most common anammox encapsulin architecture could provide a mechanism to detoxify NO, one of the reactive intermediates produced in the core anammox metabolism. Through experiments in which the Kuenenia stuttgartiensis encapsulin was heterologously expressed by an inducible plasmid in E. coli , we show evidence that suggests the K. stuttgartiensis encapsulin provides no protection from NO.