Characterization of a Mixed Methanotrophic Culture Capable of Chloroethylene Degradation

A consortium of methanotrophs cultured from the St. Joseph's aquifer in Schoolcraft, MI, was found to exhibit similar methane consumption rates as pure cultures of methanotrophs. The methanotrophic consortium resides within a portion of the aquifer contaminated with a mixed waste plume of perchloroethylene (PCE) and its reductive dechlorination products from natural attenuation, trichloroethylene (TCE), cis-dichloroethylene (c-DCE), and vinyl chloride (VC). Oxidation kinetics for TCE, c-DCE, and VC were measured for the mixed methanotroph consortium and compared to reported rate parameters for degradation of these chloroethylene compounds by pure methanotrophic cultures. The results demonstrate that the kinetics of chloroethylene oxidation by the Schoolcraft methanotroph population mimic the degradation rates of pure methanotrophic cultures that primarily express particulate methane monooxygenase (pMMO). Molecular and biochemical analyses confirmed that sMMO was not being expressed by these cells. Rather, using competitive reverse transcriptionpolymerase chain reaction, pmoA, a gene encoding one of the polypeptides of the pMMO was found at a level of (1.57 ± 0.10) × 10–17 mol pmoA mRNA/g wet soil in soil slurries and (2.65 ± 0.43) × 10–17 mol pmoA mRNA/μl in groundwater. No expression of mmoX, a gene encoding one of the polypeptides of the sMMO, was detected.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63398/1/ees.2005.22.177.pd

Translating the human microbiome

Over the past decade, an explosion of descriptive analyses from initiatives, such as the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) and the MetaHIT project, have begun to delineate the human microbiome. Inhabitants of the intestinal tract, nasal passages, oral cavities, skin, gastrointestinal tract and urogenital tract have been identified using whole genome sequencing, cultivation, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics and metabolomics. Generation of these data has led to an improved understanding of the contribution of the human microbiome to physiology, health and disease. Nature Biotechnology approached several experts to seek their views on what steps need to be taken to move from descriptive microbiome biology to targeted therapies that tackle diseases in which microbiome dysfunction is a contributory facto

Search for multimessenger sources of gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos with Advanced LIGO during its first observing run, ANTARES, and IceCube

Astrophysical sources of gravitational waves, such as binary neutron star and black hole mergers or core-collapse supernovae, can drive relativistic outflows, giving rise to non-thermal high-energy emission. High-energy neutrinos are signatures of such outflows. The detection of gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos from common sources could help establish the connection between the dynamics of the progenitor and the properties of the outflow. We searched for associated emission of gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos from astrophysical transients with minimal assumptions using data from Advanced LIGO from its first observing run O1, and data from the Antares and IceCube neutrino observatories from the same time period. We focused on candidate events whose astrophysical origins could not be determined from a single messenger. We found no significant coincident candidate, which we used to constrain the rate density of astrophysical sources dependent on their gravitational-wave and neutrino emission processes