Aquatic fecal contamination from non-point sources impairs environmental health and serves as a vehicle for transmission of waterborne disease, resulting in economic losses worldwide. Accurate methods of diagnosing fecal pollution and its source are needed to prevent human exposure, remediate pollution, and reduce economic impacts. In order to obtain this...
Bioremediation in the vadose zone is unpredictable because of poor understanding of factors influencing microbial growth in this environment. A lab-scale experimental system was developed to examine, noninvasively, interactions between microbial growth, water flow, and solute transport in unsaturated porous media. Measurements of microbial colonization, and its impact on hydrology,...
The regulation of monooxygenase enzymes has been demonstrated in bacteria that grow on methane and long chain-length alkanes (>C10). Less is known about monooxygenase regulation in short chain alkane oxidizing bacteria that grow on intermediate chain-length alkanes C2-C10. This dissertation focuses on the regulation of butane monooxygenase (BMO) expression and...
In recent years considerable interest has been shown in the diversity of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria in soil communities. The majority of the research has been carried out in Northern Europe where soils have received high atmospheric inputs of nitrogen over the past two centuries. In contrast, although much work has been...
The chemolithoautotrophic nitrite oxidizing bacteria (NOB) participate in the
biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen by catalyzing and conserving energy from the
oxidation of nitrite (NO₂-) to nitrate (NO₃-) via a nitrite oxidoreductase (NXR). The
main objective of this work was to comparatively annotate and analyze the genome
sequences of Nitrobacter winogradskyi...