Project description:Effect of phytostimulatory seed-inoculant Azospirillum lipoferum CRT1 on functional community of diazotroph (nifH)in the maize rhizosphere
Project description:The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and subsequent demand for viral testing worldwide has led to major issues in scaling the efforts of diagnostic labs and even in securing basic supplies for collection and processing of samples. This has in turn led to worldwide efforts by the scientific community to establish improved protocols that are cheaper, more scalable, and not as resource intensive. One such effort resulted in an assay called “Swab-Seq”, which was so named because it was originally developed to work with dry nasal swab samples, but is actually flexible in terms of the sample type it can accommodate for testing. The assay adapts the existing gold standard (RNA extracted from a nasopharyngeal (NP) swab that is subjected to quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, “qRT-PCR”) to a next-generation sequencing readout. By pairing this modification with extraction-free sampling techniques it is possible to achieve high scalability at low cost per sample, and a reasonable turnaround time for reporting results. We evaluated the effectiveness of this assay both on samples collected from asymptomatic individuals using the traditional NP swab and using alternative extraction-free sampling techniques, including saliva and a saline mouth gargle protocol, and found the assay to be highly sensitive (comparable to the standard qRT-PCR assay), flexible (adaptable to saliva and gargle samples stored at room temperature up to a week), and scalable (easily accommodating hundreds of samples at a time). Continued development in the future will lead to more effective testing regimes that reduce the burden of transmissible respiratory infections on the global community.
Project description:To understand microbial community functional structures of activated sludge in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and the effects of environmental factors on their structure, 12 activated sludge samples were collected from four WWTPs in Beijing. GeoChip 4.2 was used to determine the microbial functional genes involved in a variety of biogeochemical processes. The results showed that, for each gene category, such as egl, amyA, nir, ppx, dsrA sox and benAB, there were a number of microorganisms shared by all 12 samples, suggestive of the presence of a core microbial community in the activated sludge of four WWTPs. Variance partitioning analyses (VPA) showed that a total of 53% of microbial community variation can be explained by wastewater characteristics (25%) and operational parameters (23%), respectively. This study provided an overall picture of microbial community functional structures of activated sludge in WWTPs and discerned the linkages between microbial communities and environmental variables in WWTPs.
Project description:The microbial community and enzymes in fermented rice using defined microbial starter, containing Rhizopus oryzae, Saccharomycopsis fibuligera, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pediococcus pentosaceus, play an important role in quality of the fermented rice product and its biological activities including melanogenesis inhibitory activity. The microbial metaproteome revealed large-scale proteins expressed by the microbial community to better understand the role of microbiota in the fermented rice.