Changes in microbial characteristics in soils with increasing salinity were measured in 30 soil samples belonging to Kattikhel and Dargai soil series occuring in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of North West Pakistan during 2009. Microbial characteristics including microbial biomass C, microbial biomass N, C/N ratio in microbial biomass, N mineralization, nitrification, rate of CO2 evolution and cumulative ...

the influence of long-term mixed organic and inorganic contamination on soil microbial activity, community structure and genetic diversity was investigated in soil samples from a coke oven plant located in upper silesia, poland. the tested soils were heavily contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (pahs) and heavy metals. the microbial communities were characterized using the phospho...

land use change of forest ecosystems in northern iran changes the soil quality of paresar (gilan province) and gorgan (gorgan province) regions. in order to study changes in some biological soil quality indices due to land use change from forest to cultivated lands, composite soil samples from two depths (0-20 and 20-40 cm) were taken from paresar and gorgan regions and urease, alkaline and aci...

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 req...

DNA reassociation kinetics, also known as Cot curves, were recently used by Gans and co-workers to estimate the number of bacterial species present in soil samples. By reanalysing the mathematical model we show that rather than the number of species, Simpson and Shannon diversity indices are encoded in the experimental data. Our main tool to establish this result are the so-called Rényi diversi...

A microbial biofilm is structured mainly by a protective sticky matrix of extracellular polymeric substances. The appreciation of such structures is useful for the microbiologist and can be subjective to the observer. Thus, quantifying the underlying images in useful parameters by means of an objective image segmentation process helps substantially to reduce errors in quantification. This paper...

The use of pea seeds is limited due to the content of antinutritional factors that may affect gut physiology. Heat treatment such as extrusion may reduce heat-labile antinutritional factors and improve the nutritional value of pea seeds. This study determined the effect of partial replacement of soybean meal in pig diets by raw or extruded pea seeds on growth performance, nitrogen balance and p...

The gastrointestinal microbiota of neonatal pigs may be affected by dam parity. Summary Litter performance, progeny growth performance, and progeny health status may be affected by dam parity. The objective of the current experiment was to evaluate gastrointestinal microfl ora, as a measure of gut health, in progeny derived from fi rst parity (P1) compared to fourth parity (P4) dams. Fecal samp...