Infectious diseases represent a significant cause of mortality across the world in both developed and developing countries. Sepsis is one such disease that presents everywhere. It causes between six ...and nine million deaths a year globally, representing a significant cause of death across
the world. Sepsis often requires intensive care over several weeks so even when a full recovery is made, the costs are huge to both the individual and the health system. However, it is chronically underestimated as an issue worldwide. Treatment of sepsis requires administration of appropriate
antibiotics as early as possible. However, broad-spectrum antibiotics are administered at the hospitals until the infecting bacterial species is identified. This is because current identification methods rely on the time-consuming blood culture. A novel 'Tm Mapping method' has been developed
to identify the bacterial species in about three hours without the need for blood culture.
Bioaerosols cause sick building syndrome (SBS) and allergy. Many kinds of bioaerosol impactors are used for measurement of airborne microorganism concentrations in Japan. However, because the ...impactors are set on agar plates, some microorganisms cannot make colonies on the plates because of their lower viability or demands of nutrition. On the other hand, by double staining using ethidium bromide (EtBr) and carboxyfluorescein diacetate (CFDA), both total cells and cells with esterase activities can be detected without incubation. In this study, we calculated total cell concentrations and percentages of cells with esterase activities by the combination of filter sampling and double staining (EtBr and CFDA) from air of a laboratory, a conference room and outdoors. Temperature and humidity in the laboratory were constantly kept by an air conditioner, but in the conference room, an air conditioner was only operated sometimes because of its low frequency of use. There were no significant differences between total cell concentrations and humidity in both rooms, but increase of the percentages of cells with esterase activities depended on rainfall before the samplings (n=15, p<0.05 by Mann-Whitney test). The increase of active microorganisms by rainfall should be considered when we evaluate the risk of bioaerosols in the workplace. There were few differences in classifications of aerosolized bacteria by 16S rDNA sequence-based homology between the laboratory and the conference room. In both rooms, few pathogenic bacteria were observed. (San Ei Shi 2007; 49: 39-44)
Identification of 14 strains of genus Bacillus isolated from corn soup was attempted by a gas chromatographic (GC) method. The identification was based on the differences in the GC pattern of ...volatile compounds extracted from culture broth of bacteria. After cultivation of bacteria in YBG medium (0.25% yeast extract, 0.5% bacto tryptone, 0.25% glucose, pH 7.5) at 30°C for 24hr, the culture supernatant (200ml) was charged on a Porapak Q column (2ml). The adsorbed compounds were eluted with ethyl ether (3ml) and the eluate was concentrated to 30μl under vacuum. The concentrate was analyzed by GC. Twelve different species of Bacillus, which are causative bacteria of food spoilage, were used as standards for identification of isolates. To identify the isolates, the GC data of each of the isolates and those of 20 strains of genus Bacillus were subjected to cluster analysis. For 13 strains of the isolates, the results of the GC method were consistent with those of the conventional method based on biological properties. One strain which was classified as B. circulans according to its biological properties could not be identified by the GC method, because the properties of the strain were rather different from those of B. circulans JCM 2504T used as the standard. The present method could distinguish between strains such as B. cereus and B. thuringiensis which are difficult to distinguish on the basis of their biological properties. The present GC method is expected to be useful for chemotaxonomical studies, though further research on the identification of various Bacillus species isolated from food samples by the GC method seems to be necessary.
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