Introduction: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or "mild neurocognitive disorder" represents an intermediate status between normality and dementia. It is characterized by cognitive decline that does not significantly interfere with normal daily living activities. Virtual reality (VR) is the new frontier of rehabilitation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany microbial secondary metabolites are of high biotechnological value for medicine, agriculture, and the food industry. Bacterial genome mining has revealed numerous novel secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters, which encode the potential to synthesize a large diversity of compounds that have never been observed before. The stimulation or "awakening" of this cryptic microbial secondary metabolism has naturally attracted the attention of synthetic microbiologists, who exploit recent advances in DNA sequencing and synthesis to achieve unprecedented control over metabolic pathways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLiquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) is a powerful and widely applied method for the study of biological systems, biomarker discovery and pharmacological interventions. LC-MS measurements are, however, significantly complicated by several technical challenges, including: (1) ionisation suppression/enhancement, disturbing the correct quantification of analytes, and (2) the detection of large amounts of separate derivative ions, increasing the complexity of the spectra, but not their information content. Here we introduce an experimental and analytical strategy that leads to robust metabolome profiles in the face of these challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The transition from exponential to stationary phase in Streptomyces coelicolor is accompanied by a major metabolic switch and results in a strong activation of secondary metabolism. Here we have explored the underlying reorganization of the metabolome by combining computational predictions based on constraint-based modeling and detailed transcriptomics time course observations.
Results: We reconstructed the stoichiometric matrix of S.
Background: During the lifetime of a fermenter culture, the soil bacterium S. coelicolor undergoes a major metabolic switch from exponential growth to antibiotic production. We have studied gene expression patterns during this switch, using a specifically designed Affymetrix genechip and a high-resolution time-series of fermenter-grown samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMol Phylogenet Evol
March 2010
Motivation: Streptomyces is one of the best-studied genera of the order Actinomycetales due to its great importance in medical science, ecology and the biotechnology industry. A comprehensive, detailed and robust phylogeny of Streptomyces and its relatives is needed for understanding how this group emerged and maintained such a vast diversity throughout evolution and how soil-living mycelial forms (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFgamma-Butyrolactone bacterial hormones regulate antibiotic production and morphological differentiation in Streptomyces species. One gamma-butyrolactone, SCB1, has been previously characterized in Streptomyces coelicolor. Here we report the characterization of two additional gamma-butyrolactones, named SCB2 (2-[1'-hydroxyoctyl]-3-hydroxymethylbutanolide) and SCB3 (2-[1'-hydroxy-6'-methyloctyl]-3-hydroxymethylbutanolide), possessing an antibiotic stimulatory activity.
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