coli strains as a function of a(w) and concentration of HLac.
Significance and Impact of the Study:
Fermented food products have been implicated as sources of STEC in several outbreaks. The study results are relevant for modelling of growth of STEC in Lonafarnib in vitro fermented food and can be used in microbiological risk assessments or in the design and validation of food-production processes.”
“The aim of this study was to investigate trigeminal nerve involvement in patients with peripheral facial palsy. In total, 25 patients with facial nerve palsy and 19 controls were tested by electrophysiological methods regarding their facial and
trigeminal nerve functions within 1 month after disease onset. The presence of
an abnormal blink reflex was determined in patients with peripheral facial palsy by comparing paralytic and non-paralytic sides (12.3 +/- 1.1 and 10.8 +/- 1.3, respectively: p = 0.001). However, the average masseter inhibitory reflex difference between the paretic and non-paralytic sides of patients compared with the corresponding side-to-side comparison for controls was not statistically significant. LDK378 The masseter inhibitory reflex response was abnormal in some cases. These findings suggest that the masseter inhibitory reflex, a trigemino-trigeminal reflex, was normal in most of our patients with peripheral facial palsy, but may be abnormal in individual cases. Our study showed that subclinical disorders affecting the trigeminal pathways occur in individual patients with idiopathic facial palsy, while the majority of patients have no trigeminal nerve involvement. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Aims:
To develop a general method for site-directed mutagenesis in the dairy starter
strain Streptococcus thermophilus LMG 18311 which does not depend selleckchem on antibiotic-resistance genes or other selection markers for the identification of transformants.
Methods and Results:
In a previous study, we demonstrated that Strep. thermophilus LMG 18311 can be made competent for natural genetic transformation by overexpression of the alternative sigma factor ComX. In the present study, we wanted to investigate whether the natural transformation mechanism of Strep. thermophilus LMG 18311 is efficient enough to make it feasible to perform site-directed mutagenesis in this strain without the use of a selection marker. Competent bacteria were mixed with a DNA fragment engineered to contain a nonsense and a frameshift mutation in the middle of the target gene (lacZ) and subsequently seeded on agar plates. By performing colony-lift hybridization using a digoxigenin-labelled oligonucleotide probe, we succeeded in identifying transformants containing the sought after mutation.
Conclusions:
By exploiting the natural transformability of Strep.