Bacteria Heavy Metal Interactions: Biomineralization and Nanoclusters Formation

Bacteria exhibit fascinating resistant mechanisms to extreme temperatures, acidity, alkalinity, high metal, radionuclide, and salt concentrations. For this reason, they occupy not only the moderate habitats of humans, animals, plants, and insects but also extremely harsh environments such as hot springs, permafrost, acidic mine drainages, “dead” sees, etc.
Due to their ubiquitous distribution in terrestrial and aquatic environments bacteria play a major role in deposition and weathering in the earth’s crust of a large variety of minerals enriched with or consisting mainly of different metals, such as iron, manganese, copper, gold, and even radionuclides (e.g. uranium). The structure of biologically synthesized minerals is strongly influenced by the metabolic properties of the bacterial or archaeal strains involved in their production and also by the differences in their cell wall organization.