Staphylococcus aureus is a virulent pathogen and a major causative agent of superficial and invasive skin and soft tissue infections (SSSTIs). Antibiotic resistance in S. aureus, among other bacterial pathogens, has rapidly increased, and this is placing an enormous burden on the health care sector and has serious implications for infected individuals, especially immunocompromised patients. Alt...

Herein, a robust method to fabricate expanded nanofiber scaffolds with controlled size and thickness using a customized mold during the modified gas-foaming process is reported. The expansion of nanofiber membranes is also simulated using a computational fluid model. Expanded nanofiber scaffolds implanted subcutaneously in rats show cellular infiltration, whereas non-expanded scaffolds only hav...

Chitin is a biopolymer. Theoretically, it is a homopolymer of acetyl-glucosamine. Chitosan is the deacetylated product of chitin. Chitin and chitosan have many applications in water purification, agriculture, food and pharmaceutical industries. Currently, industrial production for chitin and chitosan is from the shell wastes. The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of chitin...

Chitin is a nitrogen-containing polysaccharide, related chemically to cellulose. It is a principal constituent of the exoskeleton crustaceans. Due to their biocompatibility and less toxic nature, it has been developed as new physiologically bioactive materials since they possess various biological activities. Chemical extraction of chitin from shells, of the white shrimp Parapenaeus longirostri...

Continuous nanofibers fabricated by the electrospinning technique have found increasing applications (e.g., nanofiber composites, nanofiber devices, bioengineering tissue scaffolding, etc.). For a nanofiber network subjected to a small external perturbation, the fiber segments within the network may deflect and stick to each other under the condition that their surface adhesion energy overcomes...

The chitin was isolated from the Ganoderma lucidum submerged cultures mycelium as potential source of chitin under biotechnological processes. The extraction of chitin was carried out through 5 different assays which involved mainly three phases: pulverization of the mushroom, deproteinization of the mycelia with NaOH solution, and a process of decolorization with potassium permanganate and oxa...

Chitin is commonly found in fungal cell walls and is one of the well-studied microbe/pathogen-associated molecular patterns. Previous studies showed that lysin motif (LysM)-containing proteins are essential for plant recognition of chitin, leading to the activation of plant innate immunity. In Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), the LYK1/CERK1 (for LysM-containing receptor-like kinase1/chitin e...

Enterobacter sp. NRG4 was shown to excrete chitinase into the culture supernatant when cultivated in medium containing chitin. A 60 kDa extracellular chitinase was purified to homogeneity and characterized. The enzyme hydrolyzed swollen chitin, colloidal chitin, regenerated chitin and glycol chitin but did not hydrolyze chitosan. The chitinase exhibited Km and Vmax values of 1.43 mg ml and 83.3...

Evidence for the role of chitinases in biocontrol by Trichoderma species has been well documented.Chit42 lacks a chitin–binding domain (ChBD) which is involved in its binding activity to insoluble chitin. The objective of the present study was to enhance antifungal activity of T. harzianum by overexpression of wild type and hybrid forms of Chit42 containing chitin binding domain. To produce chi...

Chitin is a globally abundant polymer widely distributed throughout eukaryotes that has been well characterized in only a few lineages. Diatoms are members of the eukaryotic lineage of stramenopiles. Of the hundreds of diatom genera, two produce long fibers of chitin that extrude through their cell walls of silica. We identify and describe here genes encoding putative chitin synthases in a vari...