Chromium (Cr) is an important raw material in some chemical industries including paint, pigments, textiles, leather tanning, steel fabrication, electroplating, cement preservation, and canning industries. Once in the environment, Cr exists in various oxidation states depending on pH and concentration. Trivalent [Cr(III)] and hexavalent [Cr(VI)] forms are the most common with Cr(VI) being the mo...

Fungi are an important and diverse component of soil communities, but these communities have proven difficult to study in conventional biotic surveys. We evaluated soil fungal diversity at two sites in a temperate forest using direct isolation of small-subunit and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) rRNA genes by PCR and high-throughput sequencing of cloned fragments. We identified 412 sequence t...

A simple and sensitive spectrophotometric method has been developed for the determination of arsenic using variamine blue as a chromogenic reagent. The method is based on the reaction of arsenic(III) with potassium iodate in acid medium to liberate iodine, which oxidizes variamine blue to form a violet coloured species having an absorption maximum at 556 nm. Beer’s law is obeyed in the range 0....

The assessment of species distribution is a first critical phase of biodiversity studies and is necessary to many disciplines such as biogeography, conservation biology and ecology. However, several species are difficult to detect, especially during particular time periods or developmental stages, potentially biasing study outcomes. Here we present a novel approach, based on the limited persist...

To study the role of broad-host-range IncP-1 plasmids in bacterial adaptability to irregular environmental challenges, a quantitative real-time PCR assay was developed that specifically detects the korB gene, which is conserved in all IncP-1 plasmids, in environmental samples. IncP-1 plasmid dynamics in a biopurification system for pesticide wastes were analyzed.

The reliable and quantitative measurement of radionuclides is important in order to determine environmental quality and radiation safety, and to monitor regulatory compliance. We examined soil samples from Podunajske Biskupice, near the city of Bratislava in the Slovak Republic, for the presence of several natural ((238)U, (232)Th, (40)K) and anthropogenic ((137)Cs, (90)Sr, (239)Pu, (240)Pu, (2...

Glyphosate is widely used in herbicides and is toxic to organism. Therefore accurate detection of glyphosate content is important for public health and food security. In this paper, methods such as gas chromatography (GC), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC/MS), liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS), ion chromatography (IC), capilla...

Although the limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) assay is widely used to determine the concentration of LPS in biological samples, it is known to be susceptible to interference caused by substances of non-bacterial origin. In particular, polysaccharides such as β-glucans and pectic polysaccharides from fungi or plants, respectively, were shown to give higher LPS readings than were actually present i...

DETERMINATION OF ACTINDE ELEMENTS iN ENVIRONMENTAL SAMPLES BY ICP-MS Jason Bedford Truscott Methods for the determination of the actinide elements m water, biological, soil and sediment samples have been developed usmg on-line sohd phase extraction and high performance liquid chromatography (I{PLC) coupled with mductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) Initial applications utilised a...

A major bottleneck for metagenomic sequencing is rapid and efficient DNA extraction. Here, we compare the extraction efficiencies of three magnetic bead-based platforms (KingFisher, epMotion, and Tecan) to a standardized column-based extraction platform across a variety of sample types, including feces, oral, skin, soil, and water. Replicate sample plates were extracted and prepared for 16S rRN...