complete ammonia oxidation

traitmech:000187 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A nitrification metabolism in which a single organism oxidizes ammonia via nitrite to nitrate.

Trait evidence (3)

DOI:10.1038/nature16459
Complete oxidation of ammonia to nitrate in one organism (complete ammonia oxidation; comammox) is energetically feasible

van Kessel et al. define complete ammonia oxidation, or comammox, as oxidation of ammonia to nitrate in a single organism.
DOI:10.1038/nature16461
Here we report on the discovery and cultivation of a completely nitrifying bacterium from the genus Nitrospira, a globally distributed group of nitrite oxidizers.

Daims et al. independently demonstrated complete nitrification in a single Nitrospira organism.
DOI:10.1128/aem.01698-23
The dominance of Nitrospira sp. BO4 could be explained by the ability of comammox to generate more energy through the complete oxidation of ammonia to nitrate

Ghimire-Kafle et al. support the same ammonia-to-nitrate scope in a freshwater complete-ammonia-oxidizing Nitrospira enrichment.

Provenance

Identifier source: TraitMech local identifier
Definition source: DOI:10.1038/nature16459

Parent traits (1)

nitrification METPO:1005001

Synonyms (1)

comammox EXACT_SYNONYM · DOI:10.1038/nature16459

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

Candidatus Nitrospira inopinata NCBITaxon:1715989 DOI:10.1038/nature16461 Daims et al. cultivated and physiologically characterized Candidatus Nitrospira inopinata as a complete nitrifier.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Resolve an exact external ontology class for one-organism complete ammonia oxidation before adding a TraitRecord xref.

CURATION TODO OPEN complete-ammonia-oxidation-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-09-14

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

The pinned METPO snapshot contains only METPO:1000862 obsolete Complete ammonia oxidation. METPO:1005001 denotes nitrification without requiring both oxidation steps to occur in one organism, while GO:0019329 ammonia oxidation and GO:0019332 nitrite oxidation each cover only one component of the comammox phenotype.

Curation history

2026-09-14T19:03:57Z · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex
Minted complete ammonia oxidation as a DOI-backed nitrification TraitRecord after a repository-wide duplicate review covering ignored and hidden files; METPO has only an obsolete Complete ammonia oxidation class in the local snapshot and the replacement placeholder is reserved in proposals/metpo_traitmech_v64.