Psychrobacter arcticus 273-4 is a Gram-negative bacterium isolated from a 20,000-to-30,000-year-old continuously frozen permafrost in the Kolyma region in Siberia. The survival strategies adopted to live at subzero temperatures include all the outer membrane molecules. A strategic involvement in the well-known enhancement of cellular membrane fluidity is attributable to the lipopolysaccharides (LPSs). These molecules covering about the 75% of cellular surface contribute to cold adaptation through structural modifications in their portions. In this work, we elucidated the exact structure of lipid A moiety obtained from the lipopolysaccharide of P. arcticus grown at 4 °C, to mimic the response to the real environment temperatures. The lipid A was obtained from the LPS by mild acid hydrolysis. The lipid A and its partially deacylated derivatives were exhaustively characterized by chemical analysis and by means of ESI Q-Orbitrap mass spectrometry. Moreover, biological assays indicated that P. arcticus 273-4 lipid A may behave as a weak TLR4 agonist.
Keywords: Lipid A; Mass spectrometry; Permafrost; Psychrobacter arcticus 273-4; Psychrotolerant.