Carbon isotope distribution of [13C]citrinin from Monascus ruber incubated with [13C]acetate revealed that the biosynthesis of the toxin originated from a tetraketide, instead of a pentaketide as has been shown for Penicillium and Aspergillus species. The production of polyketide red pigments and citrinin by M. ruber may therefore be regulated at the level of the tetraketide branch point.

We report a case of invasive gastric infection caused by Monascus ruber observed in a patient from French Guiana with gastric adenocarcinoma. The originality of this case is that, first, this invasive mycosis is extremely rare and, second, the probable mode of infection was by the consumption of Monascus ruber-contaminated food.

Editor: Brent Emerson Abstract Aim: Many studies have investigated the phylogeographic history of species on the Baja California Peninsula, and they often show one or more genetic breaks that are spatially concordant among many taxa. These phylogeographic breaks are commonly attributed to vicariance as a result of geological or climatic changes, followed by secondary contact when barriers are n...

Little is known about metabolic activity of bacteria, when viscosity of their environment changes. In this work, bacterial metabolic activity in media with viscosity ranging from 0.8 to 29.4 mPas was studied. Viscosities up to 2.4 mPas did not affect metabolic activity of Vibrio ruber. On the other hand, at 29.4 mPas respiration rate and total dehydrogenase activity increased 8 and 4-fold, resp...

Open-domain human-computer conversation has been attracting increasing attention over the past few years. However, there does not exist a standard automatic evaluation metric for open-domain dialog systems; researchers usually resort to human annotation for model evaluation, which is timeand labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose RUBER, a Referenced metric and Unreferenced metric Blended Ev...

A methanol-utilizing bacterium, Protaminobacter ruber, required cobalt ion or vitamin B12 as its growth factor, which could be replaced by succinate among various additions to the cobalt-deficient medium. The presence of adenosylcobalamin (adenosyl-B12)-dependent methylmalonyl-coenzyme A (CoA) mutase was demonstrated in the cell-free extracts of P. ruber. The specific activity of this mutase wa...

Saturated thalassic brines are among the most physically demanding habitats on Earth: few microbes survive in them. Salinibacter ruber is among these organisms and has been found repeatedly in significant numbers in climax saltern crystallizer communities. The phenotype of this bacterium is remarkably similar to that of the hyperhalophilic Archaea (Haloarchaea). The genome sequence suggests tha...