Evanescent field sensors based on waveguide surfaces play an important rolewhere high sensitivity is required. Particularly tantalum pentoxide (Ta₂O₅) is a suitablematerial for thin-film waveguides due to its high refractive index and low attenuation.Many label-free biosensor systems such as grating couplers and interferometric sensors aswell as fluorescence-based systems benefit from this wave...

Type II toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are generally composed of two genes organized in an operon, encoding a labile antitoxin and a stable toxin. They were first discovered on plasmids where they contribute to plasmid stability by a phenomenon denoted as 'addiction', and subsequently in bacterial chromosomes. To discover novel families of antitoxins and toxins, we developed a bioinformatics appr...

Cyanobacteria have evolved to survive stressful environmental changes by regulating growth, however, the underlying mechanism for this is obscure. The ability of chromosomal type II toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems to modulate growth or cell death has been documented in a variety of prokaryotes. A chromosomal mazEaFa locus of Anabaena sp. PCC 7120 has been predicted as a putative mazEF TA system. H...

In the course of this research project the output of four Task Analysis (TA) methods were investigated, explored and evaluated to ascertain whether they could support the Requirements Analysis (RA) phase and so contribute directly to other activities in the development life cycle for Interactive MultiMedia (IMM) systems. The research discusses the success and failure factors particular TA metho...

Bacterial toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems, in which a labile antitoxin binds and inhibits the toxin, can promote adaptation and persistence by modulating bacterial growth in response to stress. Some atypical TA systems, known as tripartite toxin-antitoxin-chaperone (TAC) modules, include a molecular chaperone that facilitates folding and protects the antitoxin from degradation. Here we use a TAC m...

A novel photocatalyst of Ta-doped ZnO nanoparticles was prepared by a modified Pechini-type method. The antimicrobial study of Ta-doped ZnO nanoparticles on several bacteria of Gram-positive Bacillus subtilis (B. subtilis) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Gram-negative Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) were performed using a standard microbial method...

Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are small genetic elements that typically encode a stable toxin and its labile antitoxin. These cognate pairs are abundant in prokaryotes and have been shown to regulate various cellular functions. Vibrio cholerae, a human pathogen that is the causative agent of cholera, harbors at least thirteen TA loci. While functional HigBA, ParDE have been shown to stabilize pl...

The percentage of bacterial infections refractory to standard antibiotic treatments is steadily increasing. Among the most problematic hospital and community-acquired pathogens are methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA). One novel strategy proposed for treating infections of multidrug-resistant bacteria is the activation of latent toxins of toxin-anti...

The ability of dendrimers to bind to various target molecules through non-covalent interactions was used to capture water soluble organic reagents, such as tartaric acid (TA), from different matrices, i.e. aqueous solutions and wine samples. The influence of the pH, dendrimer type, generation and feeding concentration on the host-guest complexation of TA was investigated. The maximum binding ca...

A putative type II toxin-antitoxin (TA) system was found in the clinical isolate Mycobacterium sp. MHSD3, a strain closely related to Mycobacterium chelonae. Further analyses of the protein sequences of the two genes revealed the presence of domains related to a TA system. BLAST analyses indicated the presence of closely related proteins in the genomes of other recently published M. chelonae st...