Lactococcus lactis is essential for most cheese making, and this mesophilic bacterium has its growth optimum around 30 °C. We have, through adaptive evolution, isolated a mutant TM29 that grows well up to 39 °C, and continuous growth at 40 °C is possible if pre-incubated at a slightly lower temperature. At the maximal permissive temperature for the wild-type, 38 °C, TM29 grows 33% faster and ha...

Certain kinds of cellular movements are apparently driven by actin polymerization. Examples include the lamellipodia of spreading and migrating embryonic cells, and the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, that propels itself through its host's cytoplasm by constructing behind it a polymerized tail of cross-linked actin filaments. Peskin et al. (1993) formulated a model to explain how a polymerizi...

Twelve experimental populations of the bacterium Escherichia coli evolved for 20,000 generations in a defined medium at 37 degrees C. We measured their maximum growth rates across a broad range of temperatures and at several evolutionary time points to quantify the extent to which they became thermal specialists with diminished performance at other temperatures. We also sought to determine whet...

Foodborne pathogen contamination in low water activity (aw) foods is a critical problem for both the food industry and public health. Low-moisture ingredients have been implicated numerous Salmonella outbreaks are increasingly involved recall of products with possible by Listeria monocytogenes. L. monocytogenes singled out as true environmental species pathogenic bacterium concern ready-to-eat ...

Enzymatic conversion of polysaccharides in the lignocellulosic biomass is currently subject intensive research and will be a key technology future biorefineries. Using bioinformatics approach, we previously identified putative endo-β-1,4-glucanase (DtCel5A) from Dictyoglomus thermophilum, chemoorganotrophic thermophilic bacterium. Here, structurally functionally characterize DtCel5A show that i...

On the basis of a model we capture the role of strong attractive interaction in suppressing the rotational degrees of freedom of the system and volume exclusion in keeping microscopic symmetrybreaking intact to result in super-diffusive transport of small systems in a thermal atmosphere over a large time scale. Our results, characterize such systems on the basis of having a super-diffusive inte...