The Christy Award: Excellence In Christian Fiction, An Annotated Bibliography

The burgeoning interest in Christian fiction that has marked recent years has brought with it a proliferation of new writers who are trying to make their way into the mainstream market. Alongside this growth has come a need to establish guidelines that would encourage a high standard of quality in the field. The Christian publishing industry itself responded to this challenge in 1999 by establishing an award that would identify novels and novelists of excellence. By acknowledging authors worthy of note, they hoped to encourage both creativity and quality in writing, broaden readership of the genre, and bring recognition and exposure to authors who had not yet reached a large readership

Physiology of a marine Beggiatoa strain and the accompanying organism Pseudovibrio sp. - a facultatively oligotrophic bacterium

Large filamentous sulfide-oxidizing bacteria are capable of forming huge microbial mats at the oxic-anoxic interface of the sediment surface. The first part of this thesis shows that a subpopulation of Beggiatoa filaments actively migrates into anoxic, sulfidic layers as a reaction to high sulfide fluxes. The reason for this so far unknown migration behavior seems to be excessive storage of reserve compounds. By moving into anoxic regions, aerobic sulfide oxidation is stopped and storage space is emptied by reducing the stored sulfur with carbon reserve compounds. The association of the sulfide-oxidizer and a small heterotrophic bacterium (Pseudovibrio sp.) is investigated in the second part of this thesis. In contrast to the large Beggiatoa sp., the Pseudovibrio sp. is able to grow in pure culture under extremely oligotrophic conditions. Under oligotrophic conditions we found that Pseudovibrio sp. grows on organic contaminations preferentially containing nitrogen