Bacteroides fragilis, a component of the normal intestinal flora, is an obligate anaerobe capable of long-term survival in the presence of air. Survival is attributed to an elaborate oxidative stress response that controls the induction of more than 28 peptides, but there is limited knowledge concerning the identities of these peptides. In this report, RNA fingerprinting by arbitrarily primed P...

Porphyromonas gingivalis is an anaerobic microorganism that inhabits the oral cavity, where oxidative stress represents a constant challenge. A putative transcriptional regulator associated with oxidative stress, an oxyR homologue, is known from the P. gingivalis W83 genome sequence. We used microarrays to characterize the response of P. gingivalis to H2O2 and examine the role of oxyR in the re...

Protoheme is essential for the growth of some strains of Bacteroides melaninogenicus. At low concentrations in the growth medium, protoheme determines the doubling time, total cell yield, and amount of cytochrome per bacterium. At high protoheme concentrations, the doubling time, total cell yield, and amount of enzymatically reducible cytochrome appear to remain nearly constant, and protoheme i...

Putrefactive Anaerobe strain 3679 (PA 3679) is of interest to the food microbiologist because it has been responsible for the microbial spoilage of certain types of thermally processed foods. It is also of interest because the spores of this organism have a high degree of heat resistance and their thermal death rate is frequently used in the calculation of thermal processes for low acid canned ...