Moisture damage and microbial growth in buildings have been associated with health effects among the occupants including various respiratory symptoms and asthma. However, the causative agents and the underlying mechanisms that are responsible for the adverse health effects associated with exposure in buildings are not clear. The basic phenomenon of microbial growth on building materials must be...

The increasing input of anthropogenically derived nitrogen (N) to ecosystems raises a crucial question: how does available N modify the decomposer community and thus affects the mineralization of soil organic matter (SOM). Moreover, N input modifies the priming effect (PE), that is, the effect of fresh organics on the microbial decomposition of SOM. We studied the interactive effects of C and N...

Our understanding of microbial ecology has been significantly furthered in recent years by advances in sequencing techniques, but comprehensive surveys of the phenotypic characteristics of environmental bacteria remain rare. Such phenotypic data are crucial for understanding the microbial strategies for growth and the diversity of microbial ecosystems. Here, we describe a high-throughput measur...

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are processes used for simultanuous bioenergy capturing and waste treatment. In this study, a model for MFCs based upon a conduction mechanism for electron transfer is proposed, which integrates substrate utilization, current production and conduction and  microbial distribution and growth in batch flow mode. The outputs of the model and that of a mediator based mode...

Anthropogenic changes in biodiversity and atmospheric temperature significantly influence ecosystem processes. However, little is known about potential interactive effects of plant diversity and warming on essential ecosystem properties, such as soil microbial functions and element cycling. We studied the effects of orthogonal manipulations of plant diversity (one, four, and 16 species) and war...

Restaurateurs often place a lemon slice on the rim of a beverage glass, or afloat in the beverage, as a flavor-enhancer or a decorative garnish. The handling of the lemons before their placement in the beverage may not follow sanitary procedures. The study reported here investigated whether beverage lemon slices contain microbial contamination that could be consumed by a restaurant patron. Swab...

The fate of fuel releases largely depends on the poorly-understood response in microbial community structure and function. Here, we evaluate the impacts to the microbial community resulting from a pilot-scale continuous release (10 months) of a 10% v:v ethanol solution mixed with benzene and toluene (50 mg/L each). Microbial population shifts were characterized by pyrosequencing-based 16S rRNA ...

Predictive microbial models generally rely on the growth of bacteria in laboratory broth to approximate the microbial growth kinetics expected to take place in actual foods under identical environmental conditions. Sigmoidal functions such as the Gompertz or logistics equation accurately model the typical microbial growth curve from the lag to the stationary phase and provide the mathematical b...

lighvan cheese is one of the most popular iranian cheeses that always faces to microbial problems due to traditional ways of production. in this study the effect of two types of low density polyethylene-nanocamposite films contains of ag, cuo and zno nanoparticles with different percentage increasing the shelf-life of chesse in 4̊c was investigated. microbial tests of the packed cheeses were don...