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Flowers Phillips posted an update 8 hours, 45 minutes ago
Global surveillance programs of water-borne pathogens, vector-borne diseases and zoonotic spillovers at the animal-human interface are of prime importance to rapidly detect the emergence of infectious threats. Vismodegib Novel technologies for rapid diagnostic testing, contact tracing, drug repurposing, biomarkers of disease severity as well as new platforms for the development and production of vaccines are needed for an effective response in case of pandemics.Lipoic acid is a conserved cofactor necessary for the activation of several critical enzyme complexes in the aerobic metabolism of 2-oxoacids and one-carbon metabolism. Lipoate metabolism enzymes are key for lipoic acid biosynthesis and salvage. In this study, we found that Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae (M. hyopneumoniae) Mhp-Lpl, which had been previously shown to have lipoate-protein ligase activity against glycine cleavage system H protein (GcvH) in vitro, did not lipoylate the lipoate-dependent subunit of dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase (PdhD). Further studies indicated that a new putative lipoate-protein ligase in M. hyopneumoniae, MHP_RS00640 (Mhp-LplJ), catalyzes free lipoic acid attachment to PdhD in vitro. In a model organism, Mhp-LplJ exhibited lipoate and octanoate ligase activities against PdhD. When the enzyme activity of Mhp-LplJ was disrupted by lipoic acid analogs, 8-bromooctanoic acid (8-BrO) and 6,8-dichlorooctanoate (6,8-diClO), M. hyopneumoniae growth was arrested in vitro. Taken together, these results indicate that Mhp-LplJ plays a vital role in lipoic acid metabolism of M. hyopneumoniae, which is of great significance to further understand the metabolism of M. hyopneumoniae and develop new antimicrobials against it.Sponges, the most primitive multicellular animals, contain a large number of unique microbial communities. Sponge-associated microorganisms, particularly actinomyces, have the potential to produce diverse active natural products. However, a large number of silent secondary metabolic gene clusters have failed to be revived under laboratory culture conditions. In this study, iterative atmospheric room-temperature plasma. (ARTP) mutagenesis coupled with multi-omics conjoint analysis was adopted to activate the inactive wild Streptomyces strain. The desirable exposure time employed in this study was 75 s to obtain the appropriate lethality rate (94%) and mutation positive rate (40.94%). After three iterations of ARTP mutagenesis, the proportion of mutants exhibiting antibacterial activities significantly increased by 75%. Transcriptome analysis further demonstrated that the differential gene expression levels of encoding type I lasso peptide aborycin had a significant upward trend in active mutants compared with wild-type strains, which was confirmed by LC-MS results with a relative molecular mass of 1082.43 ([M + 2H]2+ at m/z = 2164.86). Moreover, metabolome comparative analysis of the mutant and wild-type strains showed that four spectra or mass peaks presented obvious differences in terms of the total ion count or extracting ion current profiles with each peak corresponding to a specific compound exhibiting moderate antibacterial activity against Gram-positive indicators. Taken together, our data suggest that the ARTP treatment method coupled with multi-omics profiling analysis could be used to estimate the valid active molecules of metabolites from microbial crudes without requiring a time-consuming isolation process.Relative quantification 16S-seq (RQS) has drawn deeper insights into bacterial community compositions in silage. However, it provides no information on dynamics of the total amount of bacterial DNA through the ensiling process and across different treatments. In this study, bacterial compositions in alfalfa silage with and without Lactobacillus plantarum inoculation after 10 and 60days of ensiling were investigated using absolute quantification 16S-seq (AQS), and bacterial composition and its interaction with fermentation properties of silage indicated by AQS and RQS were compared. Variation in total bacterial DNA amounts across different treatments and ensiling periods was illustrated by AQS. AQS indicated higher bacterial richness indices and closer correlations of these indices with fermentation properties than RQS via spearman’s correlation analyses, as well as more taxa with significance on bacterial abundance via lefse analyses. In conclusion, AQS effectively illustrated the dynamics of bacterial communities during the ensiling process.Associations between animal health and performance, and the host’s microbiota have been recently established. In poultry, changes in the intestinal microbiota have been linked to housing conditions and host development, but how the intestinal microbiota respond to environmental changes under farm conditions is less well understood. To gain insight into the microbial responses following a change in the host’s immediate environment, we monitored four indoor flocks of adult laying chickens three times over 16 weeks, during which two flocks were given access to an outdoor range, and two were kept indoors. To assess changes in the chickens’ microbiota over time, we collected cloacal swabs of 10 hens per flock and performed 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. The poultry house (i.e., the stable in which flocks were housed) and sampling time explained 9.2 and 4.4% of the variation in the microbial community composition of the flocks, respectively. Remarkably, access to an outdoor range had no detectable effect on microbial community composition, the variability of microbiota among chickens of the same flock, or microbiota richness, but the microbiota of outdoor flocks became more even over time. Fluctuations in the composition of the microbiota over time within each poultry house were mainly driven by turnover in rare, rather than dominant, taxa and were unique for each flock. We identified 16 amplicon sequence variants that were differentially abundant over time between indoor and outdoor housed chickens, however none were consistently higher or lower across all chickens of one housing type over time. Our study shows that cloacal microbiota community composition in adult layers is stable following a sudden change in environment, and that temporal fluctuations are unique to each flock. By exploring microbiota of adult poultry flocks within commercial settings, our study sheds light on how the chickens’ immediate environment affects the microbiota composition.