This study aimed to improve the production of β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) by microbial cells immobilized on synthetic or loofa sponges both with and without the use of alginate or chitosan. The most suitable matrix for the immobilization of Bacillus firmus strain 7B was synthetic sponge and for Bacillus sphaericus strain 41 was loofa sponge. After 330 days of storage, the β-CD production by Bacillus ...

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) cause many significant ecological problems because of their low degradability, high harmfulness, and solid bioaccumulation.Two bacterial strains were isolated from soil that had been polluted with electrical transformer liquid for more than 40 years. The isolates were distinguished as Lysinibacillus macrolides DSM54Tand Bacillus firmus NBRC1530...

Activity of a Na+/H+ antiporter has been suggested to be critically involved in pH homeostasis in obligately alkalophilic bacteria (Krulwich, K. A., Mandel, K. G., Bornstein, R. F., and Guffanti, A. A. (1979) Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 91, 58-62) and in Escherichia coli (Zilberstein, D., Padan, E., and Schuldiner, S. (1980) FEBS Lett. 116, 177-180). A concern with respect to these proposals...

Three hundred and sixty-eight strains of aerobic, endospore-forming bacteria which included type and reference cultures of Bacillus and environmental isolates were studied. Overall similarities of these strains for 118 unit characters were determined by the SSM, SJ and DP coefficients and clustering achieved using the UPGMA algorithm. Test error was within acceptable limits. Six cluster-groups ...

Cells of Bacillus firmus OF4 and Bacillus alcalophilus were examined by rapid-freeze freeze-fracture and freeze-substitution electron microscopy. No special vesicular structures linked to growth at alkaline pH were found, either within or associated with the cytoplasmic membrane. The cytoplasmic membranes of the alkaliphilic bacilli and the neutrophilic Bacillus subtilis BD99 were indistinguish...

Previous studies demonstrated a high-amplitude, diel cycle for the hemolymph JH titer in the wing-polymorphic cricket, Gryllus firmus. The JH titer rose and fell in the flight-capable morph (long-winged, LW(f)) above and below the relatively temporally invariant JH titer in the flightless (short-winged, SW) morph. The morph-specific JH titer cycle appeared to be primarily driven by a morph-spec...

We report here the isolation of DNA from abdominal tissue of four extinct stingless bees (Proplebeia dominicana) in Dominican amber, PCR amplification of a 546-bp fragment of the 16S rRNA gene from Bacillus spp., and their corresponding nucleotide sequences. These sequences were used in basic local alignment search tool searches of nonredundant nucleic acid data bases, and the highest scores we...

A Gram-stain-positive, spore-forming, rod-shaped and aerobic bacterium was isolated from a sediment sample from the South Sea in China. The isolate, designated H2(T), grew at 4-45 °C (optimum 37 °C) and pH 6-10 (optimum pH 7.0). The cell-wall peptidoglycan contained meso-diaminopimelic acid. The major isoprenoid quinone was MK-7 and the polar lipids consisted of diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphat...