Foraging in ants is generally organized along well-defined trails supporting a bi-directional flow of outbound and nestbound individuals and one can hypothesize that this flow is maximized to ensure a high rate of food return to the nest. In this paper we examine the effect of bottlenecks on the temporal organization of ant flow. In our experiments ants had to cross a bridge to go from their ne...

antioxidants are vital substances which possess the ability to protect the body from damage caused by free radical-induced oxidative stress. a variety of free radical scavenging antioxidants exist within the body which many of them are derived from dietary sources like fruits, vegetables and teas. this article describes a test method for screening the antioxidant activity of 60 iranian plants o...

Despite a long and successful history of citrate production in Aspergillus niger, the molecular mechanism of citrate accumulation is only partially understood. In this study, we used comparative genomics and transcriptome analysis of citrate-producing strains-namely, A. niger H915-1 (citrate titer: 157 g L-1), A1 (117 g L-1), and L2 (76 g L-1)-to gain a genome-wide view of the mechanism of citr...

MS liquid medium supplemented with 3 mg/l NAA and 1 mg/l BAP with pH 5.7 was used for suspension cultures. Suspension cultures subjected to biotic elicitors Aspergillus niger, Fusarium oxysporium, Rhizopus oryzae and Penicillium notatum induced increase in forskolin content. Among all the elicitors tried Aspergillus niger proved to be best elicitor at 5% CF which was 6 times higher than the con...

Five microorganisms, namely Aspergillus niger CECT 2700, A. niger CECT 2915, A. niger CECT 2088, Aspergillus terreus CECT 2808, and Rhizopus stolonifer CECT 2344, were grown on corncob to produce cell wall polysaccharide-degrading enzymes, mainly xylanases, by solid-state fermentation (SSF). A. niger CECT 2700 produced the highest amount of xylanases of 504 ± 7 U/g dry corncob (dcc) after 3 day...

Antioxidants are vital substances which possess the ability to protect the body from damage caused by free radical-induced oxidative stress. A variety of free radical scavenging antioxidants exist within the body which many of them are derived from dietary sources like fruits, vegetables and teas. This article describes a test method for screening the antioxidant activity of 60 Iranian plant...