Patients suffering from bacterial bloodstream infections have an increased risk of developing systematic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), which can result in rapid deterioration of the patients’ health. Diagnostic methods for bacterial identification and antimicrobial susceptibility tests are time-consuming. …

With this study we aim to elucidate: ⎯ Whether it is possible to grow the obligate anaerobic bacterium C. difficile under aerobic conditions. ⎯ Whether there are unknown bacteria that are present in the intestinal microbiome that can be identified by optimizing a culturing method to characterize fecal …

Accumulating evidence dismisses the idea that bacteria are solitary bugs, living a completely independent existence. Instead, this definition is being replaced by the notion that bacteria are intimately communicating organisms holding tight relations to one another. One such process through which this …

With increasing world population, more wastewater is produced which all need purification treatment. Removal of pathogenic organisms is important because they can cause problems to human health. This experiment will focus on the removal of human bacterial pathogens. The problem of human bacterial pathogens …

Waterborne diseases are posing a constant threat for people. In developing countries there is a lack of microbiologically safe drinking water and in the developed countries there are occasional waterborne disease outbreaks. These diseases are caused by bacteria or parasites which can be found in various …

Probiotic bacteria harbor effector molecules that confer health benefits, but also adaptation factors that enable them to persist in the gastrointestinal tract of the consumer. To study these adaptation factors, an antibiotic-resistant derivative of the probiotic model organism Lactobacillus plantarum …

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation time of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) is a fast and reliable method for the identification of bacteria from agar media. Direct identification from positive blood cultures should decrease the time to obtaining the result. In this study, three different …

tmoA and related genes encode the alpha-subunit of the hydroxylase component of the major group (subgroup 1 of subfamily 2) of bacterial multicomponent mono-oxygenase enzyme complexes involved in aerobic benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene (BTEX) degradation. A PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis …

Eight new primer sets were designed for PCR detection of (i) mono-oxygenase and dioxygenase gene sequences involved in initial attack of bacterial aerobic BTEX degradation and of (ii) catechol 2,3-dioxygenase gene sequences responsible for meta-cleavage of the aromatic ring. The new primer sets allowed …

The exploitation of the metagenome for novel biocatalysts by functional screening is determined by the ability to express the respective genes in a surrogate host. The probability of recovering a certain gene thereby depends on its abundance in the environmental DNA used for library construction, the …