微生物学技术

Nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (NASBA) is a primer dependent, homogeneous, isothermal amplification process for the detection of RNA (1). It can result in 109- fold amplification of a specific RNA sequence and offers the unique possibility to amplify RNA in a background of geno ...

An issue of some biological currency pertains to the identification of the functional potential of cells as deduced from the nucleotide sequence of their genes. In effect, nucleotide sequences of genes assigned in some confidence to expressed proteins and function in one cell are taken, when ...

The fluorescence stains used most often for mycoplasma detection are DNA binding fluorochromes (DNAFs) and fluoresceinated antibodies. Both permit direct visualization of individual mycoplasma organisms. DNAFs will bind to any appropriately conformed DNA that is present in a s ...

The lack of a cell wall means that the growth of mycoplasmas can be inhibited by specific antiserum and provides the basis of a simple, economic, and objective means of species identification. In the diagnostic laboratory, unknown mycoplasma isolates are inoculated onto solid media and exami ...

β-lactamases confer resistance to β-lactam antibiotics, which are the most widely used family of antibiotics. It is, therefore, essential that one can identify the production of β-lactamases by clinical isolates and have effective ways of distinguishing the different enzymes. This is n ...

A significant proportion of microbial ecology is now based on the description of community structure in naturally occurring bacterial assemblages. The development of molecular biological techniques has facilitated this task, primarily via the cloning and sequencing of microb ...

Since the 1980s the use of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) sequence-based analysis to characterize microbial populations (mainly bacterial and archaeal populations) has increased significantly. This increased use is in response to the recognition that culture-based methods grossly mis ...

There has been a growing acknowledgment of both the ecological and biotechnological importance of microbes in natural environments. Concerns about the nonrepresentative nature of traditional analytical methods, as a result of their requirement for prior cultivation, have led to ...

Enormous technical advances in imaging and data acquisition techniques, combined with a continuing increased scope for fluorescence labeling of specific constituents of living organisms, have brought about a revolution in approaches to biological problems. Whereas spatial ...

The discovery that prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells could be made permeable to fluorescently labeled, sequence specific oligonucleotides makes possible the determinative probing of intact microbial cells (1). Thus, individual target cells can be identified and enumerated in h ...

Determining the taxonomic composition, biomass, and physiological status of microbial assemblages is still one of the greatest challenges facing microbial ecologists. There are many reasons why assessment of microbes in the environment is so demanding, not least their number, div ...

Direct analysis of bacteria from natural environments is problematic. Direct examination of samples by microscopy is an essential technique for bacteriologists, but is prone to error, is time-consuming, and can be tedious. In many situations, the process can be automated using flow cyto ...

Molecular biological methods are now commonly used to detect bacteria in diverse environments ranging from soils, sediments, and sludges (1,2) to plant (3) and mammalian (4,5) tissue and food or water samples (6,7). The techniques most widely used in detection methods are the polymerase chain r ...

The advent of molecular techniques has revolutionized our understanding of microbial ecology, and their use in environmental microbiology is widespread. Many of the recent studies investigating the microbial flora of diverse ecosystems have adopted a common approach of targeted ...

Until recently, studies on microbial communities present in natural environments relied on conventional optical microscopic observation and cultivation-based approaches. Although these traditional approaches remain valuable, they have a number of limitations. The mo ...

Physical separation of either intact target cells or specific molecules from many environments can result in a suspension free of contaminating particles, nontarget cells and biological inhibitors and highly enriched in the target cells or molecules of interest. The processed samp ...

The study of microbial community structure via analysis of total community DNA, or by the application of fluorescent oligonucleotide probes by fluorescent in situ hybridization, has become a valuable tool for understanding microbial diversity and abundance in a range of environmen ...

Effective monitoring of bacteria in the environment is a technical and methodological challenge. Detection and analysis of whole cells or marker molecules from entities as small as individual bacteria is a difficult task. Often it is necessary to increase the number of cells present in a samp ...

Human caliciviruses (HuCVs) and astroviruses are single-stranded RNA viruses that cause acute gastroenteritis in humans. HuCVs include several prototypes of small, round-structured viruses (SRSVs) as well as morphologically typical caliciviruses. Recent genetic chara ...

The enteroviruses and rhinoviruses are two large groups of viruses belonging to the Picornaviridae that regularly cause infections in humans. Like all picornaviruses they are small nonenveloped viruses with a single-stranded, positive sense RNA genome that contains a single open r ...