In physician's offices and biomedical labs, biological waste is handled every day. This waste is disposed of in waste containers designed for holding red autoclave bags. The containers used in these environments are closed hands-free containers, often with a step pedal. While these containers protect the user from surface-borne microorganisms, the containers may allow airborne microorganisms to...

We review the environmental role of rhamnolipids in terms of microbial life and activity. A large number of previous research supports the idea that these glycolipids mediate the uptake of hydrophobic substrates by bacterial cells. This feature might be of highest priority for bioremediation of spilled hydrocarbons. However, current evidence confirms that rhamnolipids primarily play a role in s...

The amount of thiobarbiturate-reacting material in 51 strains of bacteria and three yeasts was determined. Reactive material was found to be present in all of the gram-negative bacteria examined. It was assumed that the reactive material in this case was primarily 2-keto-3-deoxyoctonate (KDO), an eight-carbon sugar acid which is usually associated with the cell wall lipolysaccharide of members ...

BACKGROUND Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal cancers worldwide. No effective screening methods exist, and available treatment modalities do not effectively treat the disease. Established risk factors for pancreatic cancer, including smoking, chronic pancreatitis, obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus, collectively account for less than half of all pancreatic cancer cases. Accumulating ...

Our understanding of the degradation of organic matter will benefit from a greater appreciation for the genes encoding enzymes involved in the hydrolysis of biopolymers such as chitin, one of the most abundant polymers in nature. To isolate representative and abundant chitinase genes from uncultivated marine bacteria, we constructed libraries of genomic DNA isolated from coastal and estuarine w...

Microorganisms remain unrivalled in their ability to produce bioactive small molecules for drug development. However, the core technologies used to discover microbial natural products have not evolved significantly over the past several decades, resulting in a shortage of new drug leads. Advances in DNA-sequencing and bioinformatics technologies now make it possible to rapidly identify the clus...

A river-ecosystem is strongly affected by human activities. The pollutants discharged into a river from human activities may destroy the ecosystem of the river. Microorganisms in rivers (including suspended and sessile microorganisms) play key roles in degrading the pollutant and therefore in preventing the river ecosystem from being destroyed. To establish suitable measures for the protection ...

In this paper, the bioconvective flow in a porous square cavity containing oxytactic microorganism in the presence of chemical reaction is investigated. The bioconvection flow and heat transfer in porous media are formulated based on the Darcy model of Boussinesq approximation. The governing partial differential equations are solved using the Galerkin finite element method. The computational nu...