Background With the discovery of interspecies hydrogen transfer in the late 1960s (Bryant et al. in Arch Microbiol 59:20-31, 1967), it was shown that reducing the partial pressure of hydrogen could cause mixed acid fermenting organisms to produce acetate at the expense of ethanol. Hydrogen and ethanol are both more reduced than glucose. Thus there is a tradeoff between production of these compo...

A kinetic model for ethanol fermentation of lactose using yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus DSMZ 5422 is proposed. The model consists of a set of differential equations which account for substrate consumption, ethanol production and biomass production. In the model, it is assumed that alcoholic fermentation is inhibited by ethanol itself and that a different metabolic pathway is set at certain etha...

Clostridium ljungdahlii is a strictly anaerobic acetogene known for its ability to ferment a wide variety of substrates to ethanol and acetate. This bacterium presents a complex anaerobic metabolism including the acetogenic and solventogenic phases. In this study, the effect of various carbon sources on triggering the metabolic shift toward solventogenesis was considered. The bacterium was grow...

Ethanol metabolism in the liver induces oxidative stress and altered cytokine production preceding myofibroblast activation and fibrogenic responses. The purpose of this study was to determine how ethanol affects the fibrogenic response in precision-cut liver slices (PCLS). PCLS were obtained from chow-fed male Wistar rats (200-300 g) and were cultured up to 96 h in medium, 25 mM ethanol, or 25...

Plant triterpenes, such as oleanolic acid and betulin were described as hepatoprotectants active against cytotoxicity of acetaminophen or cadmium. The aim of this paper is to compare the cytoprotective activity of betulin, betulinic acid and oleanolic acid against ethanol-induced cytotoxicity in HepG2 cells. The influence of three triterpenes on ethanol-induced production of superoxide anion an...

Severe ethanol stress (>9% ethanol, v/v) as well as glucose deprivation rapidly induces a pronounced repression of overall protein synthesis in budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Therefore, transcriptional activation in yeast cells under severe ethanol stress does not always indicate the production of expected protein levels. Messenger RNAs of genes containing heat shock elements can be in...

In recent years bioethanol fuels derived from agricultural biomass resources or waste have been considered the cleanest liquid fuel alternative to fossil fuels. Ethanol consumption is expected to reach 11.2 billion gallons by 2012. Sweet sorghum, grown in the Southeast and Midwest states in US, contains 14%-20% fermentable sugar and is an ideal feedstock, owing to its ease of fermentation by ye...

Ethanol tolerance is one of the important characteristics of ethanol-producing yeast. This study focused on the improvement of ethanol tolerance of Saccharomyces cerevisiae NR1 for enhancing ethanol production by random UV-C mutagenesis. One ethanol-tolerant mutant, UVNR56, displayed a significantly improved ethanol tolerance in the presence of 15% (v/v) ethanol and showed a considerably higher...

Plackett-Burman design was employed to screen 8 parameters for ethanol production from kitchen garbage by Zymomonas mobilis in simultaneous saccharification and fermentation. The parameters were divided into two parts, four kinds of enzymes and supplementation nutrients. The result indicated that the nutrient inside kitchen garbage could meet the requirement of ethanol production without supple...

BACKGROUND Our previous pharmacological and cellular studies showed that peripheral (cardiac and vascular) nitric oxide synthase (NOS)-derived NO is implicated in the estrogen (E(2))-dependent hypotensive action of ethanol in female rats. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that enhanced NO production in the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) is implicated in the E(2)-dependent...