ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Extreme Microbiology
This article is part of the Research TopicBiology of ThermophilesView all 3 articles
Autotrophic Growth of Thermus sp. PS18 and its Genomic Determinants Shed Light on the Autotrophic Lifestyle and its Evolution in the Thermaceae Family
Provisionally accepted
Tatyana Sokolova1
Alexander G. Elcheninov1
Galina Slobodkina1
Ekaterina A. Provotorova1
Maria Zvereva2
Alexander V. Lebedinsky1
Nikolai A Chernyh1*- 1Other
- 2M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
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A thermophilic bacterial strain PS18 was isolated from a hot spring on Kunashir Island under aerobic autotrophic conditions and identified as Thermus brevis. Autotrophy has never been demonstrated in representatives of the Thermaceae family or the entire Deinococcota phylum. T. brevis PS18, in addition to the capacity for heterotrophic growth, showed sustainable autotrophic growth on thiosulfate in aerobic conditions. It could also grow anaerobically with formate and nitrate. Autotrophic growth of T. brevis PS18 was characterized in growth experiments, as well as by radioisotopic, genomic and proteomic analyses, and the leading role of the CBB cycle was demonstrated. Analysis of Deinococcota genomes available in GenBank revealed CBB cycle determinants in 24 species of the Thermaceae family. We further demonstrated autotrophic growth of T. caldilimi YIM 78456T, one of the carriers of CBB cycle determinants, and isolated two more autotrophically growing Thermus strains, T. oshimai Uz8 and T. scotoductus Uz79, from hot spring samples. These results indicate widespread occurrence of autotrophic CO₂ assimilation in representatives of the Thermaceae family, and suggest that they may be among primary producers in microbial communities of natural and anthropogenic thermal environments. Bioinformatic insight into the evolution of the autotrophic capacity in Thermaceae revealed remarkable lateral mobility of autotrophy key determinants in this family, which we explain in terms of our hypothesis of inheritance of facultative characters by gene loss and reacquisition from the pangenome. We also present bioinformatic evidence that in Thermaceae the (re)acquisition mechanism may involve heterozygous stage sustainable over generations.
Keywords: Autotrophy, bacterial evolution, Deinococcota, Genomic Analysis, heterozygosity, HGT, Polyploidy, Thermus
Received: 17 Dec 2025; Accepted: 12 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Sokolova, Elcheninov, Slobodkina, Provotorova, Zvereva, Lebedinsky and Chernyh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nikolai A Chernyh
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