The Antarctic microorganism Halorubrum lacusprofundi harbors a model polyextremophilic β-galactosidase that functions in cold, hypersaline conditions. Six amino acid residues potentially important for cold activity were identified by comparative genomics and substituted with evolutionarily conserved residues (N251D, A263S, I299L, F387L, I476V, and V482L) in closely related homologs from mesophi...

The prokaryotic residents of the Tis solar saltern in the southeast of Iran on the shore of Oman Sea were investigated by the culture-dependent methods. Sequencing of the PCR-amplified fragments of 16S rRNA genes revealed that bacterial populations were related to Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Balneolaeota, Firmicutes, and Proteobacteria. T...

The platelet binding properties of human monoclonal lupus autoantibodies have been studied. These IgM autoantibodies, produced by human X human hybridomas derived from lymphocytes of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus, are known to bind to single-stranded DNA. Four anti-DNA antibodies that express the dominant 16/6 idiotype--HF2-1/17, HF2-18/2, HF2-1/13b, and HF3-16/6--bound to glutaral...

BACKGROUND Starch is the second most abundant plant-derived biomass and a major feedstock in non-food industrial applications and first generation biofuel production. In contrast to lignocellulose, detailed insight into fungal degradation of starch is currently lacking. This study explores the secretomes of Aspergillus nidulans grown on cereal starches from wheat and high-amylose (HA) maize, as...

The ability to silence the activity of genetically specified neurons in a temporally precise fashion would open up the ability to investigate the causal role of specific cell classes in neural computations, behaviors, and pathologies. Here we show that members of the class of light-driven outward proton pumps can mediate very powerful, safe, multiple-color silencing of neural activity. The gene...

Soda lakes are salt lakes with a naturally alkaline pH due to evaporative concentration of sodium carbonates in the absence of major divalent cations. Hypersaline soda brines harbor microbial communities with a high species- and strain-level archaeal diversity and a large proportion of still uncultured poly-extremophiles compared to neutral brines of similar salinities. We present the first "me...