Biotechnological applications of white rot fungi: A review

The growing concern over the pollution issues by the rapid industrialization has posed a serious problem forcing researchers around the world to seek alternative eco-friendly technologies. Textile, pulp and paper industries discharge a huge quantity of waste in the environment, and the disposal of this waste is an immense problem. To solve this problem, work has done to discover biotechnological applications such a biological process, which can detoxify wastes and is not damaging the environment. Examples of white-rot fungi that possess selective decay at least under certain condition are C. subvermispora, Dichomitus squalens, P. chrysosporium, and Phlebia radiata. Examples of white-rot fungi that possess non-selective decay are Trametes versicolor and Fomes fomentarius. These enzymatic complexes mainly consist of lignin peroxidases (LiPs), manganese peroxidases (MnPs) and laccases. They also have capability to detoxify a range of environmental pollutants. The present work explores the potential of WRF in more recent areas of their applications such as, textile industries, food industries, bio remediation, pulp and paper industries and animal feed digestibility.

Selective Decay of Intact HIV-1 Proviral DNA on Antiretroviral Therapy

Background HIV-1 proviruses persist in people on antiretroviral therapy (ART) but most are defective and do not constitute a replication-competent reservoir. The decay of infected cells carrying intact compared with defective HIV-1 proviruses has not been well defined in people on ART. Methods We separately quantified intact and defective proviruses, residual plasma viremia, and markers of inflammation and activation in people on long-term ART. Results Among 40 participants tested longitudinally from a median of 7.1 years to 12 years after ART initiation, intact provirus levels declined significantly over time (median half-life, 7.1 years; 95% confidence interval [CI], 3.9–18), whereas defective provirus levels did not decrease. The median half-life of total HIV-1 DNA was 41.6 years (95% CI, 13.6–75). The proportion of all proviruses that were intact diminished over time on ART, from about 10% at the first on-ART time point to about 5% at the last. Intact provirus levels on ART correlated with total HIV-1 DNA and residual plasma viremia, but there was no evidence for associations between intact provirus levels and inflammation or immune activation. Conclusions Cells containing intact, replication-competent proviruses are selectively lost during suppressive ART. Defining the mechanisms involved should inform strategies to accelerate HIV-1 reservoir depletion.

Methods matter: your measures of explicit and implicit processes in visuomotor adaptation affect your results

Visuomotor rotations are frequently used to study the different processes underlying motor adaptation. Explicit aiming strategies and implicit recalibration are two of these processes. Various methods, which differ in their underlying assumptions, have been used to dissociate the two processes. Direct methods, such as verbal reports, assume explicit knowledge to be verbalizable, where indirect methods, such as the exclusion, assume that explicit knowledge is controllable. The goal of this study was thus to directly compare verbal reporting with exclusion in two different conditions: during consistent reporting and during intermittent reporting. Our results show that our two conditions lead to a dissociation between the measures. In the consistent reporting group, all measures showed similar results. However, in the intermittent reporting group, verbal reporting showed more explicit re-aiming and less implicit adaptation than exclusion. Curiously, when exclusion was measured again, after the end of learning, the differences were no longer apparent. We suspect this may reflect selective decay in implicit adaptation, as has been reported previously. All told, our results clearly indicate that methods of measurement can affect the amount of explicit re-aiming and implicit adaptation that is measured. Since it has been previously shown that both explicit re-aiming and implicit adaptation have multiple components, discrepancies between these different methods may arise because different measures reflect different components.