The environmental impacts of packaging manifest themselves at all life-cycle stages. From raw material acquisition, to package manufacture, distribution, recycling and landfilling, packaging systems deplete natural resources, consume energy, produce hazardous waste and emit pollutants. Additionally, each of these stages carries a financial cost. Driven by a desire to minimize financial costs an...

Foamy viruses (FV) differ from orthoretroviruses in many aspects of their replication cycle. A major difference is in the mode of Pol expression, regulation, and encapsidation into virions. Orthoretroviruses synthesize Pol as a Gag-Pol fusion protein so that Pol is encapsidated into virus particles through Gag assembly domains. However, as FV express Pol independently of Gag from a spliced mRNA...

Retroviral RNA packaging signal (ψ) allows the preferential packaging of genomic RNA into virus particles through its interaction with the nucleocapsid protein. The specificity of this interaction came into question when it was shown that primate retroviruses, such as HIV-1, could cross-package RNA from its simian cousin, SIV, and vice versa and that feline retrovirus, FIV could cross-package R...

In this paper, we summarize some of the key data gaps, uncertainties, and unknowns that need to be addressed to develop adequate risk assessments for nanomaterials. We make recommendations to take timely and appropriate public health precautions. We also briefly discuss nanotechnology applications for food and food packaging, and describe the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Nanotechnology in ...

The bacteria of food packaging paper and board were studied. Most of the aerobic strains were spore-formers; members of the genus Bacillus with B. cereus group (B. cereus, B. mycoides, B. thuringiensis), B. polymyxa group (B. polymyxa, B. circulans, B. macerans, B. pabuli), B. brevis and B. licheniformis predominated. The main source of spore-forming bacteria in paper and board was the broke (r...

A novel and versatile DNA packaging approach was developed by grafting DNA-binding oligopeptides onto a polymer scaffold to combinatively self-assemble with DNA into compact nanostructures.

A method has been developed for three-dimensional image reconstruction of symmetry-mismatched components in tailed phages. Although the method described here addresses the specific case where differing symmetry axes are coincident, the method is more generally applicable, for instance, to the reconstruction of images of viral particles that deviate from icosahedral symmetry. Particles are initi...

The formation of a protective protein container is an essential step in the life-cycle of most viruses. In the case of single-stranded (ss)RNA viruses, this step occurs in parallel with genome packaging in a co-assembly process. Previously, it had been thought that this process can be explained entirely by electrostatics. Inspired by recent single-molecule fluorescence experiments that recapitu...

The main goal of OPC is to offer philosophically subtle and historically sound accounts of central concepts in the history of philosophy. Each volume will be a history of its concept in that it will offer a story about the most significant events in the life of the concept from its original inception through its transformations to its modern use. The point of this narrative is to deepen underst...