background and objectives: the usepa has suggested faecal enterococci as the primary bacterial indicators. of more importance is their direct correlation with swimmer-associated gastroenteritis in recreation water quality monitoring. in contrast to other seawater bodies with 3.5% salinity, the recreational waters in the southern coast of the caspian sea possess its own salinity (about 1% w/v) a...

The construction of optimized biological fuel cells requires a cathode which combines the longevity microbial catalyst with current density an enzymatic catalyst. Laccase-secreting fungi were grown directly on cell to facilitate exchange inactive enzymes active enzymes, goal extending lifetime laccase cathodes. Directly incorporating laccase-producing fungus at extends operational cathodes whil...

in effluent-treatment processes, the major concern is with biomass production, whereas in many microbial processes it is important to produce an extracellular product, e.g. amino acid, organic acid or polysaccharide. For microbial-product formation there must often be a diversion of energy, reductant and carbon away from biomass production into product formation, and a possible energy-dependent...

In order to fully delineate the interactions of microorganisms with geological substrates, unequivocal identification of intact microbial cells within geologic samples is required without the disruption of either the rock texture or the relationship of the microorganisms to the mineral fabric. To achieve this objective we developed a protocol that enables the visualization of intact microbial c...

Development of an improved technique for separating microbial cells from marine sediments and standardization of a high-throughput and discriminative cell enumeration method were conducted. We separated microbial cells from various types of marine sediment and then recovered the cells using multilayer density gradients of sodium polytungstate and/or Nycodenz, resulting in a notably higher perce...

The discovery of a microbial ecosystem in ocean sediments has evoked interest in life under extreme energy limitation and its role in global element cycling. However, fundamental parameters such as the size and the amount of biomass of sub-seafloor microbial cells are poorly constrained. Here we determined the volume and the carbon content of microbial cells from a marine sediment drill core re...

BACKGROUND DNA-based sequencing approaches are commonly used to identify microorganisms and their genes and document trends in microbial community diversity in environmental samples. However, extraction of microbial DNA from complex environmental samples like corals can be technically challenging, and extraction methods may impart biases on microbial community structure. METHODS We designed a...

Current reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable due to pollution and finite supplies. Microbial cell factories serve as promising alternatives renewable energy resources. Microorganisms generate electricity in their metabolism; act as catalysts for converting the chemical energy into electricity. In Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC), electrons provided by microorganisms flow through an electrical ext...

Defensins and cathelicidins are the two major families of mammalian anti-microbial proteins. They contribute to host, innate, anti-microbial defense by disrupting the integrity of the bacterial cell membrane. However, several members of the mammalian anti-microbial proteins including defensins and cathelicidins have been shown recently to have chemotactic effects on host cells. Human neutrophil...