Whole genome sequence and manual annotation of Clostridium autoethanogenum, an industrially relevant bacterium

Clostridium autoethanogenum is an acetogenic bacterium capable of producing high value commodity chemicals and biofuels from the C1 gases present in synthesis gas. This common industrial waste gas can act as the sole energy and carbon source for the bacterium that converts the low value gaseous components into cellular building blocks and industrially relevant products via the action of the reductive acetyl-CoA (Wood-Ljungdahl) pathway. Current research efforts are focused on the enhancement and extension of product formation in this organism via synthetic biology approaches. However, crucial to metabolic modelling and directed pathway engineering is a reliable and comprehensively annotated genome sequence

Multiple Changes in Peptide and Lipid Expression Associated with Regeneration in the Nervous System of the Medicinal Leech

peer reviewe

SYCON - Symbolische Constraint-Propagierung auf Netzwerken Entwurf und Implementierung

TIB Hannover: RO 3552(15) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Getting around Antarctica: new high-resolution mappings of the grounded and freely-floating boundaries of the Antarctic ice sheet created for the International Polar Year.

The boundary of grounded ice and the location of ice transitioning to a freely floating state are mapped at 15-m resolution around the entire continent of Antarctica. These data products are produced by participants of the International Polar Year project ASAID using customized software combining Landsat-7 imagery and ICESat laser altimetry. The grounded ice boundary is 53 610 km long; 74% of it abuts to floating ice shelves or outlet glaciers, 19% is adjacent to open or sea-ice covered ocean, and 7% of the boundary are land terminations with bare rock. Elevations along each line are selected from 6 candidate digital elevation models: two created from the input ICESat laser altimetry and Landsat data, two from stereo satellite imagery, and two from compilations of primarily radar altimetry. Elevation selection and an assignment of confidence in the elevation value are based on agreement with ICESat elevation values and shape of the surface inferred from the Landsat imagery. Elevations along the freely-floating boundary (called the hydrostatic line) are converted to ice thicknesses by applying a firn-correction factor and a flotation criterion. The relationship between the seaward offset of the hydrostatic line from the grounding line only weakly matches a prediction based on beam theory. Airborne data are used to validate the technique of grounding line mapping, elevation selection and ice thickness derivation. The mapped products along with the customized software to generate them and a variety of intermediate products are available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center

Cancer and life-history traits : lessons from host-parasite interactions

Despite important differences between infectious diseases and cancers, tumour development (neoplasia) can nonetheless be closely compared to infectious disease because of the similarity of their effects on the body. On this basis, we predict that many of the life-history (LH) responses observed in the context of host-parasite interactions should also be relevant in the context of cancer. Parasites are thought to affect LH traits of their hosts because of strong selective pressures like direct and indirect mortality effects favouring, for example, early maturation and reproduction. Cancer can similarly also affect LH traits by imposing direct costs and/or indirectly by triggering plastic adjustments and evolutionary responses. Here, we discuss how and why a LH focus is a potentially productive but under-exploited research direction for cancer research, by focusing our attention on similarities between infectious disease and cancer with respect to their effects on LH traits and their evolution. We raise the possibility that LH adjustments can occur in response to cancer via maternal/paternal effects and that these changes can be heritable to (adaptively) modify the LH traits of their offspring. We conclude that LH adjustments can potentially influence the transgenerational persistence of inherited oncogenic mutations in populations

Extreme tolerance to cadmium and high resistance to copper, nickel and zinc in different Acidiphilium strains

Interaction of metals and microbes is widespread in nature, and causes diverse changes in the earth's biosphere including formation and solubilization of minerals (Ehrlich 1981; Poole and Gadd 1989). Several metals are essential for growth,metabolism and differentiation of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells whereas the majority of them are not known to have any indispensable biological functions (Gadd 1992). The growth requirement for essential heavy metals is normally very low, and at a few mmol l-' or lower concentrations many of these heavy metals, both essential and non-essential, show toxicity in a wide range of living systems (Fergusson 1990). However, natural tolerance to one or more of these metals occurs in many bacteria with sufficiently high frequencies even in the absence of frequent exposure to any obvious source of metals which may facilitate selection of resistant cells in a population (Silver and Misra 1988). As an example, we report here the extremely high natural tolerance to Cd, and resistance to Cu, Ni and Zn in some Acidiphilium strains which are Gram-negative, aerobic, mesophilic, acidophilic heterotrophs of acidic mine environment (Harrison 1981),and had been cultured in the laboratory for several years in simple medium devoid of any heavy metal