Airborne contamination by thermophilic actinomycetes, micromycetes and Gram negative bacteria was determined on 34 dairy farms and related to fodder drying and storage methods. Eighteen farms had a barn drying system, eight with additional heating; the remaining 16 had traditional fodder storage methods. Three air samples were obtained for each farm with a six stage Andersen sampler. The thermo...

The Tat pathway is distinct from the Sec machinery given its unusual capacity to export folded proteins, which contain a twin-arginine (RR) signal peptide, across the plasma membrane. The functionality of the Tat pathway has been demonstrated for several Gram-negative and Gram-positive mesophilic bacteria. To assess the specificity of the Tat system, and to analyze the capacity of a mesophilic ...

The thermophilic eubacterium Thermus thermophilus belongs to one of the oldest branches of evolution and has a multilayered cell envelope that differs from that of modern Gram-negative bacteria. Its outer membrane contains integral outer membrane proteins (OMPs), of which only a few are characterized. TtoA, a new beta-barrel OMP, was identified by searching the genome sequence of strain HB27 fo...

Thermophilic bacteria are among the truly unique microorganisms inhabiting our unicellular kingdom. Attempts to explain their ability to proliferate at temperatures over 70 C have resulted in widespread investigation during the past two decades. (The precise upper temperature limit for bacterial growth is a controversial issue. For a recent discussion of this problem, see reference 10.) The lit...

To test the hypothesis that the proteins of thermophilic prokaryotes are subject to unusually stringent functional constraints, we estimated the numbers of synonymous and nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions per site between 17,957 pairs of orthologous genes from 22 pairs of closely related species of Archaea and Bacteria. The average ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitutions was sig...

Environmental contamination caused by residual antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in concentrated animal feeding operations has drawn increasing attention. This study investigated the removal of oxytetracycline (OTC) and sulfamethazine (SMN) as well as the behavior of their corresponding ARGs through a series of simulated composting tests with swine manure. The results indicate ...

The bacteriostatic activities of monoacyl sugar alcohols with different acyl chains and hydrophilic heads were examined against some thermophilic sporeformers. Monomyristoyl erythritol and xylitol efficaciously suppressed their spore development. The number and orientation of the hydroxyl groups also played important roles in this activity, and monomyristoyl xylitol exhibited the highest activi...

We put forward the idea of establishing a novel interdisciplinary field of research at the interface between quantum mechanics and proteomics. The new field, called quantum proteomics, is defined as the large-scale study of the electronic structure of the proteins that define an organism’s proteome. The electronic structure of proteins is unveiled with the aid of linear-scaling quantum mechanic...