生物信息学技术

Electrospinning is one of the most versatile and effective tools to produce nanostructured fibers in the biomedical science fields. The nanofibrous structure with diameters from tens to hundreds of nanometers largely mimics the native extracellular matrix (ECM) of many tissues. Th ...

The large number of cytokines and growth factors implicated in the regulation of liver regeneration has led to the possibility of using these molecules in therapy, namely, in the case of recombinant human hepatocyte growth factor (rhHGF). The importance and potential clinical usefulness ...

Microwell arrays are cell culture and imaging platforms to assess cells at a single cell level and in high-throughput. They allow the spatial confinement of single cells in microfabricated cavities on a substrate and thus the continuous long-term observation of single cells and their prog ...

There is a large interest in the use of nucleic acids covalently bound to surfaces for a variety of biomedical uses: biosensors, microarrays, drug delivery, lab-on-chip devices, and gene therapy, etc. Most of these applications require the covalent attachment of oligonucleotides via spec ...

Micro and nanoscale protein patterning based on microcontact printing technique on large substrates have often resolution problems due to roof collapse of the poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) stamps used. Here, we describe a technique that overcomes these issues by using instead a sta ...

Despite the widespread availability of state-of-the-art biological techniques, remediation practitioners have been slow to adopt these technologies to assist in designing or indeed monitoring remediation strategies. In part, this is because practitioners are driven by cost a ...

Xenobiotic degradation during biological wastewater treatment can be established or enhanced by bioaugmentation − the addition of biological agents carrying biodegradation genes required to perform the task. Whereas the addition of microbial cells carrying chromosomal ...

Wastewater treatment systems tend to be engineered to select for a few functional microbial groups that may be organized in various spatial structures such as activated sludge flocs, biofilm or granules and represented by single coherent phylogenic groups such as ammonia-oxidizing b ...

Environmental contamination has been viewed as an ecological malaise for which bioremediation can be prescribed as a “perfect medicine.” The solution to the problems with bioremediation lies in analyzing to what extent the microbes’ physiological machinery contributes to the deg ...

Monitored natural attenuation (MNA) is an in situ remediation technology that relies on naturally occurring and demonstrable processes in soil and groundwater which reduce the mass and concentration of the contaminants. Natural attenuation (NA) involves both aerobic and anaero ...

The use of bioassays for soil characterization is receiving significant attention as a complementary tool to chemical analysis. Bioassays consist of direct toxicity assays of environmental samples that are transferred to the laboratory and analyzed for toxicity against select ...

This chapter considers the use of a variety of approaches to assess either the bioavailability or the bioaccessibility of metals in soil. The bioavailability of metals from soils is considered with respect to a series of single-extraction methods, including the use of ethylenediaminet ...

The quantification of organic contaminant bioaccessibility in soils and sediments is essential for the risk assessment and remediation of contaminated land. Within this framework, practitioners require standardised protocols. Cyclodextrins are a group of macrocyclic co ...

Community-level physiological profiling (CLPP) is a technique which offers an easily applied protocol yielding information regarding mixed microbial community function and functional adaptations over space and time. Different communities can be compared and classified ...

Each step of a molecular environmental microbiology study is prone to errors, though the qualitative and quantitative biases of PCR amplification could result in the most serious biases. One has to be aware of this fact, and well-characterized PCR biases have to be avoided by using target-opti ...

Hydrocarbons are major contaminants of soil ecosystems as a result of uncontrolled oil spills and wastes disposal into the environment. Ecological risk assessment and remediation of affected sites is often constrained due to lack of suitable prognostic and diagnostic tools that pro ...

Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis of PCR-amplified genes is a widely used fingerprinting technique in composting systems. This analysis is based on the restriction endonuclease digestion of fluorescently end-labeled PCR products. The dig ...

Bioremediation has been identified as a beneficial and effective strategy for the removal of recalcitrant environmental contaminants. Bioaugmentation of polluted environments with exogenous degrading microorganisms constitutes a major strategy of bioremediation. ...

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) can be combined with a number of staining techniques to reveal the relationships between the microorganisms and their function in complex microbial systems with a single-cell resolution. In this chapter, we have focused on staining methods for ...

Ecophysiological analysis and functions of single cells in complex microbial systems can be examined by simple combinations of Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) for identification with various staining techniques targeting functional phenotypes. In this chapter, ...