Chemical Weapon Training Center

Tear gas--harassing agent or toxic chemical weapon?

Tear gas has gained widespread acceptance as a means of controlling civilian crowds and subduing barricaded criminals. The most widely used forms of tear gas have been o-chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile and omega-chloroacetophenone. Proponents of their use claim that, if used correctly, the noxious effects of exposure are transient and of no long-term consequences. The use of tear gas in recent s...

Edgewood Chemical Biological Center

Edgewood Chemical Biological Center

Another weapon against amyloid.

A lzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of those conditions that, like cancer in earlier generations, inspires particular terror among the general public. Therapeutic advances have lagged behind insights into genetics and pathophysiology, and although -amyloid (A ), the product of amyloid precursor protein (APP) cleavage, remains the leading suspect among proposed pathogenic factors, its causal role i...

Hydrolysis of aromatic b-glucosides by non-pathogenic bacteria confers a chemical weapon against predators

Bacteria present in natural environments such as soil have evolved multiple strategies to escape predation. We report that natural isolates of Enterobacteriaceae that actively hydrolyze plant-derived aromatic b-glucosides such as salicin, arbutin and esculin, are able to avoid predation by the bacteriovorous amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum and nematodes of multiple genera belonging to the famil...