We characterized the bacterial community from an AMD tailings pond using both classical culturing and modern direct sequencing techniques and compared the two methods. Acid mine drainage (AMD) is produced by the environmental and microbial oxidation of minerals dissolved from mining waste. Surprisingly, we know little about the microbial communities associated with AMD, despite the fundamental ...

A tissue culture procedure is described which permits the quantitative evaluation of the intracellular survival of staphylococci within leucocytes. Staphylococcus aureus survived, but did not multiply, within neutrophils and monocytes of normal rabbits. The same was true of normal human blood leucocytes. Staphylococcus albus on the other hand was destroyed by these cells under the same conditio...

Investigations of microbial ecology and diversity have been greatly enhanced by the application of culture-independent techniques. One such approach, metagenomics, involves sample collections from soil, water, and other environments. Extracted nucleic acids from bulk environmental samples are sequenced and analyzed, which allows microbial interactions to be inferred on the basis of bioinformati...

It is now generally accepted in microbial ecology that cultivation-based approaches provide an incomplete picture of microbial diversity in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract because only a minority of microbes can be obtained in culture. Therefore, the application of molecular approaches, especially those focused on 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) sequence diversity, have become popular as they enable r...

Effluent from a fish tank with Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) was treated in system of two parallel fixed-bed anaerobic reactors followed by suspended stirred, anoxic reactor for solids, organic matter and nitrogen removal. Microbial community structure compared between the an enriched anammox culture originated sludge using PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) DGGE (Denaturing Gradient Gel El...

purpose: to investigate the penetration of cefixime, cephalexin and ciprofloxacin into the human eye based on microbial inhibition by human aqueous samples after oral administration. method: sixty patients aged 40 to 75 years who were scheduled for cataract surgery were divided into three equal groups. one group received 500 mg oral ciprofloxacin 24, 12 and 2 hours preoperatively; another group...

Bacterial biofilms underlie many persistent infections, posing major hurdles in antibiotic treatment. Here we design and demonstrate 'tug-of-war' optical tweezers that can facilitate the assessment of cell-cell adhesion-a key contributing factor to biofilm development, thanks to the combined actions of optical scattering and gradient forces. With a customized optical landscape distinct from tha...

There are several interconnected metabolic pathways in bacteria essential for the conversion of carbon electron sources directly into electrical currents using microbial fuel cells (MFCs). This study establishes a direct exogenous method to increase power output from a Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 containing MFC by adding calcium chloride to the culture medium. The current output from each CaCl(2...