Natural competence is the ability of certain microbes to take up exogenous DNA from the environment and integrate it in their genome. Competence development has been described for a variety of bacteria, but has so far not been shown to occur in Bacillus cereus. However, orthologues of most proteins involved in natural DNA uptake in Bacillus subtilis could be identified in B. cereus. Here, we re...

The bacteria of food packaging paper and board were studied. Most of the aerobic strains were spore-formers; members of the genus Bacillus with B. cereus group (B. cereus, B. mycoides, B. thuringiensis), B. polymyxa group (B. polymyxa, B. circulans, B. macerans, B. pabuli), B. brevis and B. licheniformis predominated. The main source of spore-forming bacteria in paper and board was the broke (r...

Bacillus anthracis is a spore-forming, Gram-positive microorganism. It is a causative agent of anthrax, a highly infectious disease. It belongs to the "Bacillus cereus group", which contains other closely related species, including Bacillus cereus, Bacillus thuringiensis, Bacillus mycoides, Bacillus weihenstephanensis, and Bacillus pseudomycoides. B. anthracis naturally occurs in soil environme...

In the past decade, several Bacillus cereus strains have been isolated from otherwise healthy individuals who succumbed to bacterial pneumonia presenting symptoms resembling inhalational anthrax. One strain was indistinguishable from B. cereus G9241, previously cultured from an individual who survived a similar pneumonia-like illness and which was shown to possess a complete set of plasmid-born...

The immunoreactivities of hydrogen fluoride (HF)-released cell wall polysaccharides (HF-PSs) from selected Bacillus anthracis and Bacillus cereus strains were compared using antisera against live and killed B. anthracis spores. These antisera bound to the HF-PSs from B. anthracis and from three clinical B. cereus isolates (G9241, 03BB87, and 03BB102) obtained from cases of severe or fatal human...

Bacillus cereus 809A and Burkholderia sp. 711C were isolated from soil. These strains demonstrate hydrolysis activity towards prochiral 2-phenyl-1,3-propanediol diacetate and accumulated the corresponding chiral monoacetates into the reaction mixture. When 2-phenyl 1,3-propanediol diacetate was used as a substrate, the produced monoacetates with Burkholderia sp. 711C were obtained in a racemic ...

The goal of this study was to identify Cd-resistant bacterial strains with endurance capacity and to evaluate their ability to remove cadmium ions from cadmium-polluted water. The Bacillus cereusS5 strain identified in this study had the closest genetic relationship with B. cereus sp. Cp1 and performed well in the removal of Cd2+ions from solution. The results showed that both the live and dead...

The goals of this work are to characterize and evaluate the ability of strain OU40 to produce poly (3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate)(PHBV) using various agricultural wastes, isolated from polluted water.Growth of the isolate OU40 was assessed in mineral media containing glucose, starch, bagasse, whey and rice bran without adding any precursors. Biopolymers produced by strain OU40 had an ...

Culture supernatants of 30 enterotoxin-producing Bacillus cereus isolates produced a characteristic progressive destruction of McCoy cell monolayers. Enterotoxin-negative B. cereus and other group 1 Bacillus spp. caused no monolayer disruption. The McCoy cell tissue culture system appears to provide a rapid screening assay for detection of enterotoxin-producing B. cereus.