The complex and dynamic nature of soil makes the assessment of soil biodiversity difficult. Findings presented here form part of a wider scheme to develop ‘bio-sampling’ methods based on earthworm cast analysis. Our overall aim is to achieve high throughput, metabolic procedures to monitor soil biological activity and, in particular, to investigate the potential for gene transfer from plants to...

cadmium effects on soil microbial indices and on the interaction of arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi (amf) and as well on plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (pgpr) were investigated. the experiments were performed in the framework of a factorial design with levels of cadmium (0, 10, 30 and 100 mg kg-1 soil), and microbial inoculations (control, pgpr and amf) employing russian kanapweed as the expe...

background and objectives: pre-requisite programs (prps) are “primary conditions and requirements essential for haccp operations, which are crucial in food safety programs”. the present study was conducted to evaluate the impact of implementation of prps on the microbial parameters of pasteurized milk (according to the national standard of iran). effectiveness of haccp operation requirements an...

Ecological diversity indices are frequently applied to molecular profiling methods, such as terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP), in order to compare diversity among microbial communities. We performed simulations to determine whether diversity indices calculated from T-RFLP profiles could reflect the true diversity of the underlying communities despite potential analytica...

Intertidal mudflats are land-sea interaction areas and play important roles in global nutrient cycles. However, a comprehensive understanding of microbial communities in these mudflats remains elusive. In this study, mudflat sediment samples from the Dongtan wetland of Chongming Island, the largest alluvial island in the world, were collected. Using a modified metatranscriptomic method, the dep...

The relationship between the diversity of mixed-species microbial consortia and their electrogenic potential in the anodes of microbial fuel cells was examined using different diversity measures as predictors. Identical microbial fuel cells were sampled at multiple time-points. Biofilm and suspension communities were analysed by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis to calculate the number an...