Harvesting and amplifying gene cassettes confers cross-resistance to critically important antibiotics.

Amikacin and piperacillin/tazobactam are frequent antibiotic choices to treat bloodstream infection, which is commonly fatal and most often caused by bacteria from the family Enterobacterales. Here we show that two gene cassettes located side-by-side in and ancestral integron similar to In37 have been "harvested" by insertion sequence IS26 as a transposon that is widely disseminated among the Enterobacterales. This transposon encodes the enzymes AAC(6')-Ib-cr and OXA-1, reported, respectively, as amikacin and piperacillin/tazobactam resistance mechanisms.

Does pre-enrichment of anodes with acetate to select for spp. enhance performance of microbial fuel cells when switched to more complex substrates?

Many factors affect the performance of microbial fuel cells (MFCs). Considerable attention has been given to the impact of cell configuration and materials on MFC performance. Much less work has been done on the impact of the anode microbiota, particularly in the context of using complex substrates as fuel.

Biogeochemical consequences of a changing Arctic shelf seafloor ecosystem.

Unprecedented and dramatic transformations are occurring in the Arctic in response to climate change, but academic, public, and political discourse has disproportionately focussed on the most visible and direct aspects of change, including sea ice melt, permafrost thaw, the fate of charismatic megafauna, and the expansion of fisheries. Such narratives disregard the importance of less visible and indirect processes and, in particular, miss the substantive contribution of the shelf seafloor in regulating nutrients and sequestering carbon. Here, we summarise the biogeochemical functioning of the Arctic shelf seafloor before considering how climate change and regional adjustments to human activities may alter its biogeochemical and ecological dynamics, including ecosystem function, carbon burial, or nutrient recycling.

Enhanced bio-production from CO by microbial electrosynthesis (MES) with continuous operational mode.

Technologies able to convert CO2 to various feedstocks for fuels and chemicals are emerging due to the urge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and de-fossilizing chemical production. Microbial electrosynthesis (MES) has been shown a promising technique to synthesize organic products particularly acetate using microorganisms and electrons. However, the efficiency of the system is low.

No re-calibration required? Stability of a bioelectrochemical sensor for biodegradable organic matter over 800 days.

Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) operated as biosensors could potentially enable truly low-cost, real-time monitoring of organic loading in wastewaters. The current generated by MFCs has been correlated with conventional measures of organic load such as Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), but much remains to be established in terms of the reliability and applicability of such sensors. In this study, batch-mode and multi-stage, flow-mode MFCs were operated for over 800 days and regularly re-calibrated with synthetic wastewater containing glucose and glutamic acid (GGA).