A systematic analysis of the effect of corn, wheat, and poultry dusts on interleukin-8 production by human respiratory epithelial cells.

The objective of this study was to determine the inflammatory response initiated by various organic dusts by measuring in vitro interleukin-8 (I-8) production from transformed respiratory epithelial cells after dust exposure. To accomplish this objective, the following specific tasks were performed: 1) dust samples were collected from grain farms, grain storage facilities, and poultry houses and their endotoxin levels were determined; 2) A549 transformed respiratory epithelial cells were exposed to 0, 10, 100, or 1,000 mug/ml of organic dust or lipopolysaccharide (LPS); and, 3) production was measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbant assays (ELISAs). The results indicate that LPS induced at all concentrations.

Identification of the sources of Escherichia coli in a watershed using carbon-utilization patterns and composite data sets.

The field of bacterial source tracking (BST) has been rapidly evolving to meet the demands of water pollution analysis, specifically the contamination of waterways and drinking water reservoirs by point source and nonpoint source pollution. The goal of the current study was to create a BST library based on carbon-utilization patterns (CUP) for predicting sources of E. coli in a watershed, to compare this library to an antibiotic-resistance analysis (ARA) library previously published for the same isolates, and to determine the efficacy of using a composite dataset which combines data from both datasets into a single library for predicting the source of unknown isolates.