微生物学技术

Some travelers believe that the difficulties of a voyage become its most pleasurable memories. Others doubt this maxim or believe that it operates only in retrospect, and take a guidebook and compass along. This chapter is written for the second type of traveler.

The purification of antimicrobial peptides from natural sources often yields only minute amounts of peptides. Although continuing miniaturization of many analytical methods and bioassays has reduced peptide requirements, X-ray crystallography and 3D NMR still obligate 10 mg ...

Antibiotic peptides are host defense effector molecules broadly distributed throughout the animal kingdom. Many different families of peptides can be identified based on mature peptide structure or, in some cases, by similar propeptide structure (1). These peptides have been iden ...

Host defense in mammals involves a cooperative effort by a variety of antimicrobial peptides (1), which are produced by both phagocyte precursors and some epithelia. They are called on to combat invading pathogens at sites of infection and to help protect mucosal surfaces. Although sharing s ...

The remarkable advances and improvements in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology and methodology in recent years have made significant impact on the investigation of biological macromolecules, including amphipathic helical peptides. Through NMR studies, the three ...

The optical activity characteristic of organic molecules is a result of the absorption of light as electrons are promoted to higher molecular orbitals. In UV-visible spectroscopy, the transition process is described by the Beer-Lambert Law, A = εcd, in which A is the experimentally measured a ...

Hemolymph of invertebrate animals contains many molecules involved in unique and effective innate defense systems against invading microbes. Their defense systems are activated by the recognition of common epitopes on pathogens, such as bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS), p ...

Hemocytes of the horseshoe crab contain a family of arthropod peptide antibiotics, termed the tachyplesin family, and an antibacterial protein, called anti-LPS factor, of which the former is located in the small (S) granules and the latter in the large (L) granules of the hemocytes (1–5). In our ongo ...

The human mitochondrial genome was completely sequenced in 1981 by Anderson and co-workers (1) and consists of a closed circular supercoiled DNA molecule of 16,569 base pairs. Mammalian cells characteristically contain a few hundred to several thousand mitochondria, each with 2-10 cop ...

The endosymbiotic hypothesis proposes that mitochondria were once freeliving organisms that colonized another cell. Millions of years of evolutionary pressure created the present-day situation in which the mitochondrion is a semiautonomous organelle that is fully integra ...

The neutral/neutral two-dimensional (2D) agarose gel technique has proved to be a powerful tool for analyzing DNA structure. It was initially adapted and developed by Brewer and Fangman to localize and define bidirectional DNA replication origins on plasmids in yeast (1). Since then, neut ...

Although a variety of degenerative diseases are now known to be caused by two mutations in mitochondrial genes, the pathophysiology of these diseases remains poorly understood. As a consequence, relatively little progress has been made in developing new therapies for mitochondrial d ...

The human mitochondrial genome (see Fig. 1) is a 16,569-bp (base pair) circle of double-stranded DNA (1). It contains genes encoding 2 ribosomal RNAs, 22 transfer RNAs, and 13 structural genes, all of which are subunits of the respiratory chain complexes. Of the 13 structural genes, 7 encode subunits of c ...

Recently, clear evidence has been obtained in our laboratory of a large accumulation of specific point mutations at the same critical control sites for replication in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of human fibroblasts (1) and skeletal muscles (2). This demonstration was based on the use of a very se ...

The ability to measure rare mutational events in mitochondrial genomes from human blood and tissues without resorting to phenotypic selection is invaluable. It is essential for the study of the cause(s) of mitochondrial mutation and for the identification of mutations associated with ...

Resistance of bacteria to antibiotics has become one of the main problems in human health. In addition, in agronomy, microbial diseases are largely responsible for the decrease in agricultural production. The discovery of new antibiotic families is a way to circumvent such problems and ant ...

The advent of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has greatly accelerated the discovery, purification, and characterization of antimicrobial peptides. Virtually every modern study of an antimicrobial peptide includes or was preceded by a description of its purific ...

Peptide antibiotic research, which in the larger sense includes protein antibiotic research, actually began during the late 19th century with the work of Ehrlich, Metchnikov, Kanthack, and Petterson. Now it has been absorbed into the fields of microbiology, immunology, histochemist ...

It has been established that at least three of the neutrophil-derived cationic antibiotic proteins, in addition to their antibiotic activity, can bind lipopolysaccharide. It is generally accepted that the binding to lipopolysaccharide, an outer membrane component of Gram-negat ...

The traditional view of the polymorphonuclear leukocyte (PMN) or neutrophil has been a cell whose primary function was to ingest and kill bacteria. It is becoming increasingly clear that a number of these granule constituents that were originally studied because of their antibiotic acti ...