Archaea 1, 9–18 © 2002 Heron Publishing—Victoria, Canada The ultrastructure of Ignicoccus: Evidence for a novel outer membrane and for intracellular vesicle budding in an archaeon REINHARD RACHEL,1,2 IRITH WYSCHKONY,1 SABINE RIEHL1,3 and HARALD HUBER1 1 Lehrstuhl für Mikrobiologie und Archaeenzentrum, Universität Regensburg, Universitätsstr. 31, D-93053 Regensburg, Germany 2 Author to whom correspondence should be addressed (
[email protected]) 3 Present address: Aventis Behring GmbH, Emil-von-Behring-Strasse 76, D-35041 Marburg, Germany Received July 9, 2001; accepted August 13, 2001; published online September 21, 2001 Summary A novel genus of hyperthermophilic, strictly periplasmic space of archaea (Baumeister and Lembcke 1992, chemolithotrophic archaea, Ignicoccus, has been described re- Engelhardt and Peters 1998), in analogy to the structure of cently, with (so far) three isolates in pure culture. Cells were many bacterial cell envelopes. prepared for ultrastructural investigation by cultivation in cel- To investigate the ultrastructure by ultrathin sectioning, it is lulose capillaries and processing by high-pressure freezing, necessary to preserve the organisms in, as close as possible, freeze-substitution and embedding in Epon. Cells prepared in their native state. In recent studies with hyperthermophilic accordance with this protocol consistently showed a novel cell archaea (Rieger et al. 1995, 1997), we achieved this preserva- envelope structure previously unknown among the Archaea: a tion by preparing cells for electron microscopy by cultivation cytoplasmic membrane; a periplasmic space with a variable in cellulose capillaries, followed by high-pressure cryo-immo- width of 20 to 400 nm, containing membrane-bound vesicles; bilization and freeze-substitution.