Removal of contaminants from polluted environments could be improved by taking advantage of the catabolic capacity of some microorganisms in a process called bioremediation. Nowadays, the use of microbial associations (also called microbial consortia) is gaining attention, because they seem to have a wider degradation spectrum than that exhibited by isolated strains. M10 is a bacterial consorti...

This chapter introduces the Random Modulation Pre-Integrator (RMPI) and details the status of an integrated circuit implementing the architecture. To our knowledge, this is the first full-speed hardware RMPI in existence. The goal of this chapter is to describe some key parameters of the RMPI that are essential to its performance. This is not a hardware chapter and does not go into detail of th...

Fluorinated compounds are known to be more resistant to microbial degradation than other halogenated chemicals. A microbial consortium capable of aerobic biodegradation of fluorobenzene (FB) as the sole source of carbon and energy was isolated by selective enrichment from sediments collected in a drain near an industrial site. A combination of three microbial strains recovered from the enriched...

The valorization of aromatic heteropolymer lignin is an important unsolved problem in the development of a biomass-based biorefinery, for which novel high-activity biocatalysts are needed. Sequencing of the genomic DNA of lignin-degrading bacterial strain Sphingobacterium sp. T2 revealed no matches to known lignin-degrading genes. Proteomic matches for two manganese superoxide dismutase protein...

Deconstructing the intricate matrix of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin poses a major challenge in biofuel production. In diverse environments in nature, some microbial communities, are able to overcome plant biomass recalcitrance. Identifying key degraders of each component of plant cell wall can help improve biological degradation of plant feedstock. Here, we sequenced the metagenome of l...

The identification of predominant microbial taxa with specific metabolic capabilities remains one the biggest challenges in environmental microbiology, because of the limits of current metagenomic and cell culturing methods. We report results from the direct analysis of multiple genes in individual marine bacteria cells, demonstrating the potential for high-throughput metabolic assignment of ye...