The unicellular green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has long been studied for its unique fermentation pathways and has been evaluated as a candidate organism for biofuel production. Fermentation in C. reinhardtii is facilitated by a network of three predominant pathways producing four major byproducts: formate, ethanol, acetate and hydrogen. Previous microarray studies identified many genes a...

Marine microbial communities often contain multiple closely related phylogenetic clades, but in many cases, it is still unclear what physiological traits differentiate these putative ecotypes. The numerically abundant marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus can be divided into at least 14 clades. In order to better understand ecotype differentiation in this genus, we assessed the diversity of a Syn...

Arsenic (As) contamination in soil and groundwater has become a serious problem to public health. To examine how microbial communities and functional genes respond to long-term arsenic contamination in vertical soil profile, soil samples were collected from the surface to the depth of 4 m (with an interval of 1 m) after 16-year arsenic downward infiltration. Integrating BioLog and functional ge...

A recent study by Lacroix et al (1) compared the postprandial utilization of nitrogen from 3 different proteins, namely micellar casein (“slow protein”), milk soluble protein isolate (“fast protein”), and total milk protein (another “slow protein”). Their data suggest that slow protein induces better postprandial nitrogen utilization than does fast protein. According to Lacroix et al, “This res...

T HREE switchback metabolism studies were conducted to study the effects of replacing corn with 5, 10 and 15% cane molasses. Five percent molasses had no significant effect on any of the parameters studied. At 10 and 15% molasses added at the expense of corn in the basal ration, nitrogen retention and apparent digestibility of dry matter and energy were all significantly improved (P< .05) . The...

New estimates are obtained of oxygen utilization rates on isopycnal surfaces in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre thermocline based on tritium inventories (2.4-3.5 mol m -2 yr -1) and 228Ra measurements (8.5 _+ 0.8 mol m -2 yr-l). Arguments are given for why the tritium inventory oxygen utilization rate estimate may be too low. The 228Ra results are combined with recent estimates of oxygen ut...

This study was conducted to examine the effects of dietary cellulose levels on growth, nitrogen utilization, the retention time of diets in the digestive tract, and caecal microflora of 2-month-old Single Comb White Leghorn male chickens fed 3 purified diets that contained 0, 3.5% and 10% cellulose in equal amount of nutrients for 7 days. Body weight gain and nitrogen utilization were significa...

Recently, microbe-plant interactions at the above-ground parts have attracted great attention. Here we describe nitrogen metabolism and regulation of autophagy in the methylotrophic yeast Candida boidinii, proliferating and surviving on the leaves of Arabidopsis thaliana. After quantitative analyses of yeast growth on the leaves of A. thaliana with the wild-type and several mutant yeast strains...

That root system architecture (RSA) has an essential role in nitrogen acquisition is expected in maize, but the genetic relationship between RSA and nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) traits remains to be elucidated. Here, the genetic basis of RSA and NUE traits was investigated in maize using a recombination inbred line population that was derived from two lines contrasted for both traits. Under hi...

The rat repletion method of assay of protein value, developed by Cannon’s group at the University of Chicago (24), has been applied to liquid protein hydrolysates and amino acid mixtures in this laboratory (5, 6). The method has the advantage of convenient volumetric portioning of the amino acid components of the diet. With properly conditioned depleted animals, there is quantitative acceptance...