Traditional public health bacterial indicators of water quality and the Biolog® system were evaluated to compare their response to other indicators of stream condition with the state of Oregon and between ecoregions (Coast Range, Willamette Valley, Cascades, and Eastern Oregon). Forty-three randomly selected Oregon rivers were sampled during the summer...
Mycobacterium avium is a ubiquitous environmental organism found in both water and soil. It can cause disease in patients with previous pulmonary conditions, as well as immunosupressed patients, with the most prevalent being AIDS patients. Studies have indicated that passage through amoeba, a common environmental protozoa, increases virulence of M....
Clostridium perfringens is the causative agent of gas gangrene and the 3rd most common cause of type A food borne disease in the United States. Critical to the pathogenicity of C. perfringens is the ability of this bacterium to produce highly resistant, metabolically dormant spores that can resume metabolic function...
Clostridium perfringens is a pathogenic anaerobic bacterium able to produce more than 17 toxins, allowing C. perfringins to cause a wide variety of diseases in humans and animals. Beside toxins production, C. perfringens able to form a highly resistance spores can survive in the environments for years. These spores are...
Clostridium perfringens is the causative agent of a wide variety of diseases in animals and humans. C. perfringens can produce more than 15 toxins. However, individual strains produce a subset of these toxins. Although a small percentage of C. perfringens isolates (mostly belonging to type A) produce C. perfringens enterotoxin...
Myxobacteria represent an interesting class of Gram-negative soil bacteria. These bacteria utilize organic materials from the environment as a food source by the action of their extracellular hydrolytic enzymes. They grow vegetatively in the presence of adequate nutrients. During starvation conditions, however, they aggregate and form multicellular structures called fruiting...
The past decade of research has potentiated a revolution in our understanding of mammalian health and evolution by revealing that the gut microbiome plays a central role in mammalian physiology. Our ability to unlock this potential hinges upon the identification of specific groups of gut microbes that elicit effects on...
Marine natural products possess an abundance of diverse chemical scaffolds with unique biological activities. By targeting unusual or unique microbial environments within varying marine ecologies we can continue to discover novel chemistry with potentially new molecular targets. The research presented here is focused on exploring unusual chemical ecologies and the...
Cell-cell communication in bacteria is understood to facilitate the coordination of population-wide cooperative behavior in the form of concerted gene expression. The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa uses such a communication mechanism to regulate a large group of genes important to virulence strategies in this bacterium. This general mechanism of communication...
Historically, the difficulty of obtaining pure cultures of abundant marine
microbial plankton has an obstacle to reconstructing the underlying
mechanisms of biogeochemistry in the ocean. While a number of dominant
marine species from the ocean surface have been cultured, the dominant
microbial plankton of the dark ocean proved far more...