Project description:BACKGROUND:Anthropogenic perturbations have strong impact on water quality and ecological health of mangrove areas of Indian Sundarbans. Diversity in microbial community composition is important causes for maintaining the health of the mangrove ecosystem. However, microbial communities of estuarine water in Indian Sundarbans mangrove areas and environmental determinants that contribute to those communities were seldom studied. METHODS:Nevertheless, this study attempted first to report bacterial and archaeal communities simultaneously in the water from Matla River and Thakuran River of Maipith coastal areas more accurately using 16S rRNA gene-based amplicon approaches. Attempt also been made to assess the capability of the environmental parameters for explaining the variation in microbial community composition. RESULTS:Our investigation indicates the dominancy of halophilic marine bacteria from families Flavobacteriaceae and OM1 clade in the water with lower nutrient load collected from costal regions of a small Island of Sundarban Mangroves (ISM). At higher eutrophic conditions, changes in bacterial communities in Open Marine Water (OMW) were detected, where some of the marine hydrocarbons degrading bacteria under families Oceanospirillaceae and Spongiibacteraceae were dominated. While most abundant bacterial family Rhodobacteracea almost equally (18% of the total community) dominated in both sites. Minor variation in the composition of archaeal community was also observed between OMW and ISM. Redundancy analysis indicates a combination of total nitrogen and dissolved inorganic nutrients for OMW and for ISM, salinity and total nitrogen was responsible for explaining the changes in their respective microbial community composition. CONCLUSIONS:Our study contributes the first conclusive overview on how do multiple environmental/anthropogenic stressors (salinity, pollution, eutrophication, land-use) affect the Sundarban estuary water and consequently the microbial communities in concert. However, systematic approaches with more samples for evaluating the effect of environmental pollutions on mangrove microbial communities are recommended.
Project description:The development of more complex but reliable systems for compound testing in a pharmaceutical context is a challenging task to date. Three-dimensional (3D), organ mimetic cell culture is aiming to become an alternative to common two-dimensional (2D) cell culture or animal testing in that field. We developed a biocompatible 3D cell culture environment for a hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) model that enables cellular maintenance in a polycarbonate scaffold structure. Albumin, regarded as a differentiation marker, was elevated in statically 3D cultivated HepG2 cells. Expression of HCC tumor marker alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) was reduced compared to immunofluorescence stainings of 2D cultivated cells. Remarkably, expression of cytokeratin and pathophysiologically relevant beta-1 integrin (ITGB1) was found enhanced in nonperfused 3D cell culture. Changes in gene expression induced by the 3D cultivation environment were investigated using Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA). Our findings revealed involvement of the insulin growth factor (IGF) signaling pathway in upregulation of matrix metalloproteinases (MMP) and ITGB1. The experimental data indicate a more differentiated state in 3D cultivated HepG2 cells than in the respective 2D experiments. Hence, scaffold-supported 3D cultivation of HepG2 cells may lead to a gain of information valuable for both drug testing and cancer research.
Project description:Angelica sinensis (Oliv.) Diels is an important Chinese medicinal plant. A. sinensis seedlings are grown on an undisturbed alpine meadow soil to ensure the high-quality seedlings, but these soils are disappearing year after year. Thus, selecting a suitable bed soil for A. sinensis seedlings could ensure their long-term sustainability. Using HiSeq sequencing of 16S and 18S marker genes, we investigated the rhizosphere bacterial and fungal microbiotas of the seedlings grown in wheat, astragalus, potato, and angelica-cultivated soils at a geo-authentic habitat. Co-occurrence network analysis, canonical correspondence analysis, Mantel test, and Envfit test were used to examine the relationship between the microbiotas and the surrounding factors. Astragalus-cultivated soils exhibited the following properties: the highest plant weight, the highest neighborhood connectivity in the bacterial network, the highest ratio of positive/negative relationship in both bacterial and fungal networks, the highest relative abundance of the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and the ectomycorrhizal fungi, the lowest relative abundance of Rhizoctonia solani, the suitable soil pH, and the close relationship between the rhizosphere microbiotas and the ecological factors. Moreover, each growth stage has its own major drivers in all crop-cultivated soils. Climate temperature and soil pH at 56 days after planting, precipitation at 98 days, and plant weight as well as microbial biomass C and N at 129 days were the major drivers of the bacterial and fungal microbiotas. Overall, the astragalus-cultivated soil was a suitable bed soil for nurturing A. sinensis seedlings to replace the undisturbed alpine meadow soils.