Hospitals discharge considerable amounts of chemicals and microbial agents in their wastewaters. Problem chemicals present in hospital wastewater belong to different groups, such as antibiotics, X-ray contrast agents, disinfectants and pharmaceuticals. Many of these chemical compounds resist normal wastewater treatment. They end up in surface waters where they can influence the aquatic ecosyste...

Total laryngectomy, a surgical treatment for extensive cancer of larynx, which alters swallowing and respiration in patients, is followed up with a surgical voice restoration procedure comprising tracheoesophageal puncture techniques with insertion of a "voice prosthesis" to improve successful voice rehabilitation. However, microbial colonization is a major drawback of these devices. Antimicrob...

Microbial anodes were constructed with stainless steel electrodes under constant polarisation. The seawater medium was inoculated with a natural biofilm scraped from harbour equipment. This procedure led to efficient microbial anodes providing up to 4A/m(2) for 10mM acetate oxidation at -0.1 V/SCE. The whole current was due to the presence of biofilm on the electrode surface, without any signif...

In marine environments, macrofauna living in or on the sediment surface may alter the structure, diversity and function of benthic microbial communities. In particular, microbial nitrogen (N)-cycling processes may be enhanced by the activity of large bioturbating organisms. Here, we study the effect of the burrowing mud shrimp Upogebia deltaura upon temporal variation in the abundance of genes ...

this work studies the biosurfactants production which enables the diesel biodegradation byusing mixed microbial consortia from polluted sites. it was carried out by culturing three microbial consortia(named as xa, xb and xc) obtained from polluted soils, and enriched in diesel as sole carbon source.batchexperiments were done to study the effects of three variables (temperature,hydrocarbon conce...

Plastics are the most abundant form of marine debris, with global production rising and documented impacts in some marine environments, but the influence of plastic on open ocean ecosystems is poorly understood, particularly for microbial communities. Plastic marine debris (PMD) collected at multiple locations in the North Atlantic was analyzed with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and next-g...

Process hygiene plays a major role in the production of high quality beer. Knowledge of microorganisms found in the brewery environment and the control of microbial fouling are both essential in the prevention of microbial spoilage of beer. The present study examined the growth of surface-attached beer spoilage organisms and the detection and elimination of microbial biofilms. Moreover, the det...

The aim of the study was to evaluate the usefulness of bioluminescence in the determination of cleanliness of steel surfaces characterised by different roughness (0.6 and 0.8 μm). The applicability of the method was assessed based on correlations between the number of relative light units (RLU) measured with a luminometer and microbial counts determined by the conventional microbiological metho...

Biofilm is an assembly of the microbial cells that is irreversibly associated with a surface and usually enclosed in a matrix of polysaccharide material. Biofilm is composed of microbial cells and extra cellular polymeric substance (EPS). Extra cellular polymeric matrix plays various roles in structure and function of different biofilm communities. Adhesion to the surface provides considerable ...

The present study aims at designing a promising Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) to utilize wastewater in order to generate electricity. Two types of salt bridge have been used in MFC (KCl and NaCl). The maximum electricity generation with 1M KCl and NaCl has been 823 and 713 mV, respectively. Varied salt concentrations (0.5M, 1M, 2M, and 3M) of salt bridge in MFC have been analyzed with different fac...