Long-Term Tillage and Crop Rotation Regimes Reshape Soil-Borne Oomycete Communities in Soybean, Corn, and Wheat Production Systems.

Soil-borne oomycetes include devastating plant pathogens that cause substantial losses in the agricultural sector. To better manage this important group of pathogens, it is critical to understand how they respond to common agricultural practices, such as tillage and crop rotation. Here, a long-term field experiment was established using a split-plot design with tillage as the main plot factor (conventional tillage (CT) vs.

Core and conditionally rare taxa as indicators of agricultural drainage ditch and stream health and function.

Background: The freshwater microbiome regulates aquatic ecological functionality, nutrient cycling, pathogenicity, and has the capacity to dissipate and regulate pollutants. Agricultural drainage ditches are ubiquitous in regions where field drainage is necessary for crop productivity, and as such, are first-line receptors of agricultural drainage and runoff. How bacterial communities in these systems respond to environmental and anthropogenic stressors are not well understood.

Use of 2-hydroxy-4-(methylthio)-butanoic acid to inhibit Salmonella and Listeria in raw meat for feline diets and palatability in domestic cats.

While the raw pet food market continues to grow, the risk of bacterial contamination in these types of diets is a major concern, with Salmonella enterica and Listeria monocytogenes being the most frequently associated pathogens in raw pet food product recalls. dl-Methionine is included in some commercial feline kibble and canned diets to improve protein quality; however, an alternative to this is a liquid methionine supplement, 2-hydroxy-4-(methylthio)-butanoic acid (HMTBa), which is also an organic acid. 2-Hydroxy-4-(methylthio)-butanoic acid has previously demonstrated similar efficacy to formic acid against pathogens in a liquid environment and may be a good candidate to inhibit S.

Towards Improved Detection and Identification of Rust Fungal Pathogens in Environmental Samples Using a Metabarcoding Approach.

The dispersion of fungal inocula such as the airborne spores of rust fungi (Pucciniales) can be monitored through metabarcoding of the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) of the rRNA gene in environmental DNAs. This method is largely dependent on a high-quality reference database (refDB) and primers with proper taxonomic coverage and specificity. For this study, a curated ITS2 reference database (named CR-ITS2-refDB) comprising representatives of the major cereal rust fungi and phylogenetically related species was compiled.

Impacts of food matrix on bacteriophage and endolysin antimicrobial efficacy and performance.

Food contamination with bacterial pathogens is a persisting threat and challenge for producers, consumers, and health care systems globally. Thus, there is a need for novel and targeted food safety practices. This review discusses the importance of characterizing bacteriophage and endolysins for specific food matrices, as well as characterizing individual properties of food matrices to guide optimized bacteriophage and endolysin usage and engineering.

Genomic and Proteomic Analyses of Serovar Enteritidis Identifying Mechanisms of Induced Tolerance to Ceftiofur.

With the alarming proliferation of antibiotic resistance, it is important to understand the development of bacterial adaptation to antibiotics in formerly susceptible lineages, in the absence of external genetic input from existing resistance pools. A strain of ceftiofur susceptible serovar Enteritidis ABB07-SB3071 (MIC = 1.0 μg/ml) was successively exposed to sub-MIC of ceftiofur to allow its adaptation for tolerance to a concentration of 2.

Draft Genome Sequences of Two Novel Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica Strains Isolated from Low-Moisture Foods with Applications in Food Safety Research.

The genomes of two strains of subsp. serovar Cubana and serovar Muenchen, isolated from dry hazelnuts and chia seeds, respectively, were sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq platform, assembled using the overlap-layout-consensus method, and aligned to their respective most identical sequence genome scaffolds using MUMMER and BLAST searches.

Thermal-Stability and Reconstitution Ability of Phages P100 and A511.

The study evaluated the thermal-stability of phages P100 and A511 at temperatures simulating the preparation of ready-to-eat meats. The phage infectivity after heating to 71°C and holding for a minimum of 30 s, before eventually cooling to 4°C were examined. Higher temperatures of 75, 80, and 85°C were also tested to evaluate their effect on phages thermal-stability.

Characterization of antimicrobial properties of Salmonella phage Felix O1 and Listeria phage A511 embedded in xanthan coatings on Poly(lactic acid) films.

Beyond simply providing a barrier between food and external contaminants, active packaging technologies aim to inhibit pathogen survival and growth within the packaged environment. Bacteriophages have a proven track record as targeted antimicrobials but have yet to be successfully integrated in active packaging without serious loss of activity. We have developed two bacteriophage based xanthan coatings on poly(lactic acid) (PLA) film which significantly inhibits Salmonella Typhimurium and Listeria monocytogenes growth in culture (P < 0.

Propagation method for persistent high yield of diverse Listeria phages on permissive hosts at refrigeration temperatures.

The efficient production of a high concentration of bacteriophage in large volumes has been a limiting factor in the exploration of the true potential of these organisms for biotechnology, agriculture and medicine. Traditional methods focus on generating small volumes of highly concentrated samples as the end product of extensive mechanical and osmotic processing. To function at an industrial scale mandates extensive investment in infrastructure and input materials not feasible for many smaller facilities.

Long noncontractile tail machines of bacteriophages.

In this chapter, we describe the structure, assembly, function, and evolution of the long, noncontractile tail of the siphophages, which comprise ∼60% of the phages on earth. We place -particular emphasis on features that are conserved among all siphophages, and trace evolutionary connections between these phages and myophages, which possess long contractile tails. The large number of high-resolution structures of tail proteins solved recently coupled to studies of tail-related complexes by electron microscopy have provided many new insights in this area.

Transcriptional analysis of a Dehalococcoides-containing microbial consortium reveals prophage activation.

Chlorinated solvents are among the most prevalent groundwater contaminants in the industrialized world. Biodegradation with Dehalococcoides-containing mixed cultures is an effective remediation technology. To elucidate transcribed genes in a Dehalococcoides-containing mixed culture, a shotgun metagenome microarray was created and used to investigate gene transcription during vinyl chloride (VC) dechlorination and during starvation (no chlorinated compounds) by a microbial enrichment culture called KB-1.

mEosFP-based green-to-red photoconvertible subcellular probes for plants.

Photoconvertible fluorescent proteins (FPs) are recent additions to the biologists' toolbox for understanding the living cell. Like green fluorescent protein (GFP), monomeric EosFP is bright green in color but is efficiently photoconverted into a red fluorescent form using a mild violet-blue excitation. Here, we report mEosFP-based probes that localize to the cytosol, plasma membrane invaginations, endosomes, prevacuolar vesicles, vacuoles, the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi bodies, mitochondria, peroxisomes, and the two major cytoskeletal elements, filamentous actin and cortical microtubules.

The crystal structure of bacteriophage HK97 gp6: defining a large family of head-tail connector proteins.

The final step in the morphogenesis of long-tailed double-stranded DNA bacteriophages is the joining of the DNA-filled head to the tail. The connector is a specialized structure of the head that serves as the interface for tail attachment and the point of egress for DNA from the head during infection. Here, we report the determination of a 2.