Intracellular fate of hydrocarbons: possible existence of specific compartments for their biodegradation.

In previous work, purification procedures and zymogram analysis conducted with supernatants of crude extracts from aerobic mycelium of the YR-1 strain of Mucor circinelloides isolated from petroleum-contaminated soils indicated the existence of only one soluble alcohol oxidase (sAO) activity. In the present work enzymatic activity of alcohol oxidase (AO) was also detected in the mixed membrane fraction (MMF) of a high-speed centrifugation procedure after drastic ballistic cellular homogenization to break the mycelium from strain YR-1. When mycelial cells were gently broken by freezing the mycelium with liquid nitrogen, smashing in a mortar, and submitting the samples to an isopycnic sucrose gradients (10-60% sucrose), AO activity was detected in particular and discrete fractions of the gradient, showing specific density values quite different from the density of peroxisomes. The results suggest that there could be a different intracellular pattern of distribution of the microsomal fraction in aerobically grown mycelium depending on the carbon source used in the culture media, including alcohols and hydrocarbons, but not in glucose. In working with particulate fractions, we found two AO activities: a new membrane alcohol oxidase (mAO) activity and the sAO. Both activities appear to be located in the inner of the cells in specific compartments different from the peroxisomes, so mAO could be in the membrane of these compartments and sAO in the lumen of the vesicles. We also assayed other enzymatic activities involved in hydrocarbon biodegradation to establish its intracellular location and other enzymatic activities such as peroxidase to use them as intracellular markers of different organelles. In the case of monooxygenase, the first enzymatic step in the hydrocarbon biodegradation pathway, its location was in the same fractions where AOs were located, suggesting the existance of a specific organelle that contains the enzymatic activities involved in hydrocarbon biodegradation.