In an environment, microbes often work in communities to achieve most of their essential functions, including the production of essential nutrients. Microbial biofilms are communities of microbes that attach to a nonliving or living surface by embedding themselves into a self-secreted matrix of extracellular polymeric substances. These communities work together to enhance their colonization of surfaces, produce essential nutrients, and achieve their essential functions for growth and survival.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPriority question exercises are increasingly used to frame and set future research, innovation and development agendas. They can provide an important bridge between the discoveries, data and outputs generated by researchers, and the information required by policy makers and funders. Microbial biofilms present huge scientific, societal and economic opportunities and challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInitially, research disciplines operated independently, but the emergence of trans-disciplinary sciences led to convergence research, impacting graduate programs and research laboratories, especially in bioengineering and material engineering as presented here. Current graduate curriculum fails to efficiently prepare students for multidisciplinary and convergence research, thus creating a gap between the students and research laboratory expectations. We present a convergence training framework for graduate students, incorporating problem-based learning under the guidance of senior scientists and collaboration with postdoctoral researchers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe growth and survival of an organism in a particular environment is highly depends on the certain indispensable genes, termed as essential genes. Sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) are obligate anaerobes which thrives on sulfate reduction for its energy requirements. The present study used G20 (OA G20) as a model SRB to categorize the essential genes based on their key metabolic pathways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA significant amount of literature is available on biocorrosion, which makes manual extraction of crucial information such as genes and proteins a laborious task. Despite the fast growth of biology related corrosion studies, there is a limited number of gene collections relating to the corrosion process (biocorrosion). Text mining offers a potential solution by automatically extracting the essential information from unstructured text.
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