PCDDs, PCDFs, and dioxin like PCBs (dioxin) surveillance results derived from regular environmental monitoring as well as other dioxin surveys by national and local governmental bodies in Japan were collected and analyzed. Several thousand data for air and soil in fiscal year 2001 (from 01/04/2001 to 31/03/2002) and 2002, water (from the sea, rivers and lakes), sediment (from the sea, rivers an...

The use of biodegradation methods by microorganisms in the removal of industrial dyes are widely considered owing to their high efficiency and compatibility to the environment. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the biodegradation of methylene blue (MB) from aqueous solution by bacteria isolated from contaminated soil. This study was performed in laboratory scale on bacteria isolated and pu...

Soil contamination with heavy metals such as arsenic has harmful effects on human health and agricultural products. Arsenic (AS) is one of the heavy metals which are highly toxic and carcinogenic. This research was conducted to study the effect of organic manure on increasing the Arsenic absorption ability by Cress plant in the greenhouse of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Research Center...

Biosphere 2 is the first man-made, soil-based, bioregenerative life support system to be developed and tested. The utilization and amendment of local space resources, e.g. martian soil or lunar regolith, for agricultural and other purposes will be necessary if we are to minimize the requirement for Earth materials in the creation of long-term off-planet bases and habitations. Several of the rol...

Soil analysis is crucial for estimating the risk of crop damage by root-knot nematode Meloidogyne hapla. Here, we developed an assay based on Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP). The LAMP primers were verified specificity against 10 different species. A manual soil DNA extraction, referred to as SKMM, was and compared with a FastDNA kit followed purification. extracted both methods fr...

Potent PCR inhibitors in blood and soil samples can cause false negative results from PCR-based clinical and forensic tests. We show that the effect of these inhibitors is primarily upon Taq DNA polymerase, since mutational alteration of the polymerase can overcome the inhibition to the extent that no DNA purification is now required. An N-terminal deletion (Klentaq1) is some 10-100-fold inhibi...

Extraction of high-quality DNA is a key step in PCR detection of Cryptosporidium and other pathogens in environmental samples. Currently, Cryptosporidium oocysts in water samples have to be purified from water concentrates before DNA is extracted. This study compared the effectiveness of six DNA extraction methods (DNA extraction with the QIAamp DNA minikit after oocyst purification with immuno...

Recovery of mRNA from environmental samples for measurement of in situ metabolic activities is a significant challenge. A robust, simple, rapid, and effective method was developed for simultaneous recovery of both RNA and DNA from soils of diverse composition by adapting our previous grinding-based cell lysis method (Zhou et al., Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 62:316-322, 1996) for DNA extraction. O...

In this study, soil bacteria were isolated and characterized including its antimicrobial peptide. For this, soil samples were collected from agriculture lands. Soil samples were diluted and cultured in nutrient agar plates to obtain the isolated bacterial colonies. Antimicrobial peptide producers were screened by stab overlay, agar well diffusion, cross streaking and lacuna assay methods. The i...