微生物学技术

Enzymes are finding increasing use for the production of agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and fine chemicals. They are almost always used in the immobilized form in order to simplify their removal from the product stream. In addition, immobilization often enhances the stability of the e ...

Proteases from halophilic microorganisms present the advantage of being stable at high salinities, constituting interesting enzymes from a biotechnological point of view. To maintain osmolarity in saline environments the microorganisms adopt mainly two strategies, one fo ...

Optically pure amino acids are of increasing industrial importance as chiral building blocks for the synthesis of food ingredients, pharmaceuticals, drugs, and drug intermediates. Highly stereoselective enzymatic processes have been developed to obtain either D- or L-amino aci ...

Natural selection has created optimal catalysts that exhibit their convincing performance even with a number of sometimes counteracting constraints. Nucleic acid polymerases, for example, provide for the maintenance, transmission, and expression of genetic information a ...

Over the last century, microorganisms have been a great source of metabolic and enzymatic diversity. In recent years, emerging recombinant DNA techniques have facilitated the development of new efficient expression systems, modification of biosynthesis pathways leading to dif ...

Enterococci are the focus of increasing academic and clinical research because of their importance as agents in nosocomial infections that are frequently refractory to many commonly used antimicrobial agents (1–3). To facilitate studies on the pathogenic and drug resistance mech ...

The importance of the Clostridia both in terms of their pathogenicity toward humans and their potential role in biotechnological processes has prompted many studies of the genetic manipulation of these organisms. Obviously, a prerequisite for such studies is a means of introducing rec ...

Borrelia burgdorferi is an etiologic agent of Lyme disease, the most common arthropod-borne disease in the United States (1,2). The bacterium, a member of the spirochete phylum, has a genome predominantly composed of linear DNA molecules (3,4). Formulating a medium in which B. burgdorferi gro ...

Transformation methods for the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have allowed for rapid advances in molecular genetic studies with this model microorganism, for the development of alternative expression systems to prepare recombinant proteins, and for the development ...

Many of the techniques that have been developed for the manipulation of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have now been adapted to be used on the alternative host, Schizosaccharomyces pombe. One particularly important technique is the introduction of exogenous DNA into the ye ...

The introduction of exogenous DNA into prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells is one of the most frequently used procedures in the daily laboratory work of a molecular geneticist. In recent years, methods based on high-voltage electric shocks have been established for various species (revie ...

The fungi encompass an enormous array of species, ranging from microscopic uninucleate, unicellular forms to multinucleate, coenocytic, highly differentiated macroscopic morphological forms. The wealth of diversity provided by a wide variety of life cycles, the availability ...

The genus Candida comprises a group of yeasts united by nothing more than the fact that none has a natural sexual cycle. If these yeasts do not form a natural grouping, they nonetheless contain a number of species of considerable scientific and practical interest. Candida albicans is an important o ...

The protist Physarum polycephalum is a convenient system for studies of molecular and cellular biology of fundamental eukaryotic processes, including DNA replication, mitotic regulation, single-cell development, the cytoskeleton, and motility. The life cycle of this acellu ...

Dictyostelium discoideum has long been an intriguing model system for the study of cell type divergence during development, cell signaling, gene expression, and other cell biological problems (1). With the development of DNA-mediated transformation, research in Dictyostelium h ...

Tetrahymena thermophila is a free-living ciliated protozoan useful in cell biological and molecular genetic studies. Recently DNA-mediated transformation has been developed for this microorganism (1), and used to study the mechanisms of genome rearrangement (2–4) and structu ...

Electroporation was first applied in Giardia lamblia in 1990 by Furfine and Wang (1) to introduce a full-length giardiavirus (GLV) single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) into uninfected G. lamblia cells. After electroporation, the cells were grown to confluency and passed serially at 1∶13 dilutio ...

The protozoan genus Trypanosoma contains several pathogenic parasites of major medical and veterinary importance. These include Trypanosoma brucei subspecies, the causative agents of African trypanosomiasis, and Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of American trypa ...

A common limitation in any molecular biological study is the introduction of DNA, whether bacteriophage or plasmid, into a recipient strain. Electroporation has a number of advantages over other more traditional methods for the introduction of DNA into cells, the most significant being t ...

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several laboratories (1–4) reported that an applied electric field could induce transient pores in eukaryotic cell membranes. In addition to small molecules, such as sucrose and dyes, DNA could be introduced into these electropermeabilized cells (5–7). Mo ...