BACKGROUND Sundarban is the world's largest coastal sediment comprising of mangrove forest which covers about one million hectares in the south-eastern parts of India and southern parts of Bangladesh. The microbial diversity in this sediment is largely unknown till date. In the present study an attempt has been made to understand the microbial diversity in this sediment using a cultivation-inde...

5 S rRNA is an integral component of the large ribosomal subunit in all known organisms. Despite many years of intensive study, the function of 5 S rRNA in the ribosome remains unknown. Advances in the analysis of ribosome structure that have revealed the crystal structures of large ribosomal subunits and of the complete ribosome from various organisms put the results of studies on 5 S rRNA in ...

In eukaryotic cells, ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene is transcribed by RNA polymerase I (pol I) in the nucleolus as a large (40 S-47 S) precursor RNA (pre-rRNA) (for reviews, see refs. [1,2]). The mature rRNA species (28 S, 18 S and 5.8 S) are formed after a series of specific endonucleolytic cleavage reactions (for a review, see ref. [3]). The rRNA gene (rDNA) is highly reiterated and is arranged in...

One of the most commonly observed surface structures on the prokaryotic cell envelopes is monomolecular crystalline array of proteinaceous subunits termed Surface Layers or S-layers. Due their self assembly ability and the highly ordered, regular structure down to the nanometer scale, S-layers were demonstrated to possess a great potential for nanobiotechnological applications. Some probiotic b...

The human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, maintains at least two distinct types, A and S, of developmentally controlled ribosomal RNAs. To investigate specific functions associated with these rRNAs, we replaced the Saccharomyces cerevisiae GTPase domain of the 25S rRNA with GTPase domains corresponding to the Plasmodium A- and S-type 28S rRNAs. The A-type rRNA differs in a single nonco...

The 16S ribosomal RNA of the Euglena gracilis chloroplast has been characterized in terms of its two-dimensional electrophoretic "fingerprint" (T1 ribonuclease). Results show it to be a typically prokaryotic 16 S rRNA. By the present criterion, different chloroplasts are shown to be related to one another and at least distantly to blue-green algae and perhaps to Bacillaceae. These results argue...

A 16S rRNA-targeted oligonucleotide probe specific for the iron (Fe3+)- and manganese (Mn4+)-reducing bacterium Shewanella putrefaciens was constructed and tested in both laboratory- and field-based hybridization experiments. The radioactively labeled probe was used to detect S. putrefaciens in field samples collected from the water column and sediments of Oneida Lake in New York and its major ...