Impact of flow regime on pressure drop increase and biomass accumulation and morphology in membrane systems.

Biomass accumulation and pressure drop development have been studied in membrane fouling simulators at different flow regimes. At linear flow velocities as applied in practice in spiral wound nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) membranes, voluminous and filamentous biofilm structures developed in the feed spacer channel, causing a significant increase in feed channel pressure drop. Elevated shear by both single phase flow (water) and two phase flow (water with air sparging: bubble flow) caused biofilm filaments and a pressure drop increase.

Human cytomegalovirus and monocytes: limited infection and negligible immunosuppression in normal mononuclear cells infected in vitro with mycoplasma-free virus strains.

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection has previously been associated with the production of immunosuppression. The mechanism by which any such immunosuppressive effect might be mediated is unclear but previous work has implicated an effect of the virus on monocytes. We have attempted to characterize the immunosuppressive activity produced by in vitro infection of normal monocytes with HCMV strain AD169.

The effect of cytomegalovirus on hemopoiesis: in vitro evidence for selective infection of marrow stromal cells.

We studied the effects of adding cytomegalovirus (CMV) in vitro to normal human bone marrow mononuclear cells (BM-MNCs), committed myeloid progenitor cells, primitive myeloid blast-colony forming cells, and pre-formed marrow stromal cell monolayers in order to shed light on the mechanism by which hemopoiesis is suppressed in patients who acquire systemic CMV infection after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. Incubation of BM-MNCs or committed progenitor cells with laboratory strain AD169 or wild strain CMV had no significant effect on total colony numbers or the morphology of component cells. CMV mRNA was not identified by in situ hybridization.