Early life stimulation is known to produce long-lasting changes in the brain and behavior. One such early stimulation method is the neonatal novelty exposure procedure which allows the isolation of the novelty effect from several prominent confounding factors inherent to the neonatal handling procedure. In two previous studies, we found long-lasting novelty effects on different sets of function...

Four commercial kits, Oxi/Ferm (OF), API 20E (AP), Minitek (MT; BBL Microbiology Systems), and Flow N/F (NF), were evaluated, without additional tests, for identification of 258 gram-negative nonfermentative rods. OF and MT were read after 48 h of incubation, and AP and NF were read after both 24 and 48 h of incubation, respectively. Overall, OF correctly identified 51% of strains, with 46% as ...

We present a method for selecting entire microbial ecosystems for bioremediation and other practical purposes. A population of ecosystems is established in the laboratory, each ecosystem is measured for a desired property (in our case, degradation of the environmental pollutant 3-chloroaniline), and the best ecosystems are used as 'parents' to inoculate a new generation of 'offspring' ecosystem...

To study the effect of chemical and biological fertilizers on growth and essential oil content of lavender (Lavandula angustifolia Mill.), the present work was conducted in 2012-2013 at the experimental field of Alborz Research Station of the Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands, Karaj, Iran. The experiment was conducted in factorial in the form of a randomized complete block design wit...

In order to evaluate the tuber fresh weight and some physiological attributes of Agria potato cultivar in response to water deficit stress and mycorrhiza inoculation, a field trial was conducted as a split plot scheme based on randomized complete block design with three replications at the research site of Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch in 2012. Four water levels including: irrigation a...

Inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) may improve plant performance at disturbed sites, but inoculation may also suppress root colonization by native AMF and decrease the diversity of the root-colonizing AMF community. This has been shown for the roots of directly inoculated plants, but little is known about the stability of inoculation effects, and to which degree the inoculant a...

The phenology of tick emergence has important implications for the transmission of tick-borne pathogens. A long lag between the emergence of tick nymphs in spring and larvae in summer should increase transmission of persistent pathogens by allowing infected nymphs to inoculate the population of naive hosts that can subsequently transmit the pathogen to larvae to complete the transmission cycle....

During a study of the effect of soil temperature on the development of a tobacco mosaic, frenching was observed on the plants at the higher soil temperatures. Since this is apparently the first time, JONES (3), that soil temperature has been recognized as a factor in inducing frenching of tobacco, Nicotiana Tabacum L., it seemed important that the technique be developed as a possible means of d...

In the simplest version of this activity, students inoculate a yeast suspension into glucose solutions of several concentrations. The glucose disappears, and the amount of CO2 produced is directly proportional to the initial amount of sugar in solution. This suggests a simple model of yeast fermentation. To challenge this model, students can perform parallel experiments in which the glucose con...

Cocoa pulp fermentation is a spontaneous process during which the natural microbiota present at cocoa farms is allowed to ferment the pulp surrounding cocoa beans. Because such spontaneous fermentations are inconsistent and contribute to product variability, there is growing interest in a microbial starter culture that could be used to inoculate cocoa pulp fermentations. Previous studies have r...