Dyes like Brilliant Blue have similar adsorptive behaviour as some organic contaminants, e.g., pesticides. Bromide ions, on the other hand, move much like NO3-N (fertilizer) in soil. Consequently, by using these two tracers, it is possible to in a general way mimic how organic contaminants and fertilizers may move through soils. Three plots with sandy soil in semiarid Tunisia were irrigated dur...

Recent studies have shown that higher plants are unable to methylate arsenic (As), but it is not known whether methylated As species taken up by plants can be volatilized. Rice (Oryza sativa L.) plants were grown axenically or in a nonsterile soil using a two-chamber system. Arsenic transformation and volatilization were investigated. In the axenic system, uptake of As species into rice roots w...

During the present study rhizosphere soil of four halophytic weeds viz., Chrysopogon aucheri, Lactuca dissecta, Solanum surattense and Sonchus arvensis growing in saline soil of Khewra salt range and Solanum surattense growing in arid region of Attock were used for isolating phosphate solubilizing bacteria. The objective of this study was to explore the abilities of phosphate solubilization, pr...

Soil acidity is a major constraint on plant productivity. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi support plant colonization in acidic soil, but soil acidity also constrains fungal growth and diversity. Fungi in extreme environments generally evolve towards specialists, suggesting that AM fungi in acidic soil are acidic-soil specialists. In our previous surveys, however, some AM fungi detected in str...

Tissue culture is an in-vitro technique for replicating a plant without introducing the degree of genetic variability inherent in sexual reproduction. Tissue culture has proven commercially important for the replication of ornamental varieties of house plants and is used extensively in research for applications in forestry. Activated carbon (AC) was initially added to tissue culture media in an...

To obtain cellulases that are capable of degrading crystalline cellulose and cedar wood, metagenomic libraries were constructed from raw soil sample which was covered to pile of cedar wood sawdust or from its enrichment cultures. The efficiency of screening of metagenomic library was improved more than 3 times by repeating enrichment cultivation using crystalline cellulose as a carbon source, c...

OBJECTIVE To determine the distribution of lesions and extent of tissues infected with Mycobacterium bovis in a captive population of white-tailed deer. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. ANIMALS 116 captive white-tailed deer. PROCEDURE Deer were euthanatized, and postmortem examinations were performed. Tissues with gross lesions suggestive of tuberculosis were collected for microscopic analys...

Prokaryotic communities in pristine and oil-contaminated desert soil, seawater, and hypersaline coastal soil were analyzed using culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches. The former technique was the dilution-plating method. For the latter, total genomic DNA was extracted and the 16S rRNA genes were amplified using a universal bacterial primer pair and primer pairs specific for Acti...