Kurzfassung:
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are recalcitrant environmental pollutants only slowly metabolized by anaerobic bacteria. In the sulfate-reducing culture N47, the degradation of naphthalene is initiated by direct carboxylation. In this PhD project, the naphthalene carboxylase subunits of N47 were identified and characterized by differential protein induction and interaction assays. It was shown that the identified subunits were encoded in an operon structure within the genome of N47.