The isolation of good quality metagenomic DNA from diverse soil, in appreciable amount, is a prerequisite for metagenomics. The availability of commercial kits for isolation of genomic DNAs from soil has drastically expedited the application of metagenomics approach for identifying novel sources of industrially important enzymes. The quantitative and qualitative assessment of metagenomic DNA is...

We developed PCR primers to detect Cylindrocladium quinqueseptatum which infect Eucalyptus causing leaf and seedling blight resulting in heavy seedling mortality in North Indian states. Primers based on sequence analysis of internal transcribed spacer region 1 and 5.8S of ribosomal DNA produced PCR product of 245bp. The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) of the ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sub unit repe...

Ciliates (or Ciliophora) are ubiquitous organisms which can be widely used as bioindicators in ecosystems exposed to anthropogenic and industrial influences. The evaluation of the environmental impact on soil ciliate communities with methods relying on morphology-based identification may be hampered by the large number of samples usually required for a statistically supported, reliable conclusi...

Spectral ratios between soft soil and reference rock sites are often used to predict the sedimentary site response to earthquakes. However , their relationship with the genuine site-specific amplification function is often unclear. We compare the soil-to-rock spectral ratios between the stations that are 3.3 km apart with the "genuine" response given by the ratios between the surface and 17 and...

seismic ground motion is profoundly affected by geometrical and mechanical properties of soil deposits overlaying bedrock. local seismic ground response of saturated soil deposits was studied in literature by applying the effects of soil stress state and index properties on the strain-dependent normalized shear modulus reduction, g/g0, and damping ratio, d, curves in an equivalent linear analys...

In this study, two strains of Bdellovibrio were isolated from soil samples using the culture-dependent technique and two members of the family Enterobacteriaceae (Klebsiella sp. and Salmonella sp.) as prey. The Bdellovibrio strains were bacteriolytic, plaque-forming, and highly motile gram-negative bacteria. We identified and confirmed the Bdellovibrio strains using microscopy, PCR amplificatio...

This paper describes the application of two direct and one indirect methods for the extraction of microbial community DNA from soils polluted with heavy metals. DNA was extracted directly from soil using a gentle method based on soil incubation at 37°C with proteinase K and SDS, or the method was modified by the addition of a bead beating step. The indirect approach was based on the RNA/DNA ext...

A PCR-based ‘molecular tool box’, based on a region of the ras-related protein gene Ypt 1, was developed for the identification of 15 Phytophthora species that damage forests and trees: P. cactorum , P. cambivora , P. cinnamomi , P. citricola , P. europaea , P. inundata , P. lateralis , P. megasperma , P. nemorosa , P. kernoviae , P. pseudosyringae , P. psychrophila , P. quercina , P. ramorum a...