In nutrient limited soils, minerals constitute a major reservoir of bio-essential elements. Consequently, the release of nutritive elements during weathering is crucial. Bacteria have been shown to enhance weathering rates; however, there has been limited work that has focused on the bacterial weathering of bedrock or parent rock, which are the major sources of minerals, in nutrient limiting so...

Inoculation experiments were carried out in pot culture to determine the effects of VA fungi on the growth of Poa bulbosa. In this experiment, four treatments  were  used: 1. Strile soil without  inoculation,  2. Strile soil plus inoculum, 3. Natural soil plus inoculum, and 4. Natural soil without inoculation. Inoculum was prepared from a suspension of mycorrhizal  roots of  Poa  plants (Root c...

Meng, Q. X., Yin, J. F., Rosenzweig, N., Douches, D., and Hao, J. J. 2012. Culture-based assessment of microbial communities in soil suppressive to potato common scab. Plant Dis. 96:712-717. A field in East Lansing, MI, showed a decline of potato common scab compared with an adjacent potato field. To confirm that the decline was due to biological factors, the soil was assayed. In the greenhouse...

Recently, borage (Borago officinalis L. Boraginaceae) has been the subject of increasing agricultural interest because of the potential market for gamma linolenic acid (GLA), an unusual fatty acid extracted from the oil seed. GLA is an omega-6 essential fatty acid which has been identified as having several beneficial properties. Increased interest in production of the crop in western Canada ha...

An essential first step in investigations of viruses in soil is the evaluation of viral recovery methods suitable for subsequent culture-independent analyses. In this study, four elution buffers (10% beef extract, 250 mM glycine buffer, 10 mM sodium pyrophosphate, and 1% potassium citrate) and three enumeration techniques (plaque assay, epifluorescence microscopy [EFM], and transmission electro...

Bdellovibrio-and-like organisms (BALOs) are widespread obligatory predators of other Gram-negative bacteria. Their detection by culture-dependent methods is complicated as their replication is totally dependent upon the availability of an appropriate prey. Because BALOs do not form numerically dominant groups within microbial communities, non-specific culture-independent tools also generally fa...

A supervised feature selection algorithm was applied to determine the most important features contributing to wheat grain yield. Four hundreds seventy two fields (as records) from different parts of Iran which were different in 21 characteristics (features) were selected for feature selection analysis. Selection of the wide range of features, including location, genotype, irrigation regime, fer...

The effect of inoculation of Aspergillus flavus , Fusarium verticillioides , and Penicillium sp. in Dystrophic Red Latosol (DRL) and Eutroferric Red Latosol (ERL) soils with or without glucose on the total carbohydrate content and the dehydrogenase and amylase activities was studied. The fungal growth and spore production in culture medium with and without glucose were also evaluated. A complet...

The antibiotic-producing bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, is assumed to be important in protecting plants from soilborne diseases. S. fluorescens S272, a hyper-producing strain of pyoluteorin (PT) and 2,4-diacetylphloroglucinol (DG), had previously been isolated from soil. The present paper reported that the growth of water-cultivated Kaiware radish was promoted to 120-140% of its normal lev...

A soil which has been polluted with chlorinated benzenes for more than 25 years was used for isolation of adapted microorganisms able to mineralize 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene (1,2,4-TCB). A microbial community was enriched from this soil and acclimated in liquid culture under aerobic conditions using 1,2,4-TCB as a sole available carbon source. From this community, two strains were isolated and ide...