Natto is a traditional Japanese food made from soybeans fermented by natto starter strains of Bacillus subtilis natto. It has been suggested that extracellular protease activity released by the bacteria are involved in the production of poly-γ-glutamate (γ-PGA) during natto fermentation. One of the natto starters, strain r22, possesses at least seven genes, each of which encoded an extracellula...

In order to improve the therapeutic efficacy and minimize the side effects of lung cancer chemotherapy, the formulation of paclitaxel-loaded poly(glycolide-co-ε-caprolactone)-b-D-α-tocopheryl polyethylene glycol 2000 succinate nanoparticles (PTX-loaded [PGA-co-PCL]-b-TPGS2k NPs) was prepared. The novel amphiphilic copolymer (PGA-co-PCL)-b-TPGS2k was synthesized by ring-opening polymerization an...

Inhalational anthrax is a serious biothreat. Effective antibiotic treatment of inhalational anthrax requires early diagnosis; the further the disease has progressed, the less the likelihood for cure. Current means for diagnosis such as blood culture require several days to a result and require advanced laboratory infrastructure. An alternative approach to diagnosis is detection of a Bacillus an...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the usefulness of the ternary complex with protamine and γ-polyglutamic acid (γ-PGA), which are biodegradable materials for foods and medical products, as a safe gene delivery vector. We formed cationic binary complexes (plasmid DNA (pDNA)/protamine complexes) with high transfection efficiency. The binary complex showed slight toxicity probabl...

This paper describes a generalisation of the Phase Gradient Autofocus (PGA) algorithm that allows strip-map operation. A standard autofocus technique, PGA, uses prominent points within the target scene to estimate the point spread function of the system. PGA was developed for tomographic mode spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) but has limited applicability for side-scan synthetic aperture...

Poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) is an important natural biopolymer that is used widely in fields of foods, medicine, cosmetics, and agriculture. Several B. amyloliquefaciens LL3 mutants were constructed to improve γ-PGA synthesis via single or multiple marker-less in-frame deletions of four gene clusters (itu, bae, srf, and fen) encoding antibiotic substances. γ-PGA synthesis by the Δsrf mutant sh...

The ywtD gene, which codes for an enzyme that degrades -polyglutamic acid (PGA), was cloned from Bacillus subtilis IFO16449. The gene is located immediately downstream of ywsC and ywtABC, a PGA operon involved in PGA biosynthesis, and it showed partial similarity to genes coding for DL-endopeptidase, a peptidoglycan-degrading enzyme. The ywtD gene, from which signal sequence is excised, was ins...

esophago-pulmonary fistula after esophagectomy Anastomotic leakage, which is one of the complications of esophagectomy, sometimes causes a refractory fistula despite conservative therapy [1]. Polyglycolic acid (PGA) sheets (Neoveil; Gunze, Kyoto, Japan), a suture reinforcement material that is absorbed within 4–15 weeks, have been used in many fields of open and endoscopic surgery [2,3] to prev...

Understanding the mechanisms and controlling factors of erosion rates is essential in order to sufficiently comprehend bigger processes such as landscape evolution. For decades, scientists have been researching erosion rates where one of the main objectives was to find the controlling factors. A variety of parameters have been suggested ranging from climate-related, basin morphometry and the te...

Guinea pig liver microsomes in the presence of NADPH catalyzed the hydroxylation of prostaglandin A, (PGA,) and prostaglandin E, (PGE,) primarily (>95%) at them-1 and to a minor extent (~5%) at the w position, yielding 19-hydroxy and 20-hydroxy derivatives. The identity of the 19-hydroxy metabolites was established in the form of 19-OH-PGB, after isolation with the help of high pressure liquid ...