Plant pathogens and diseases

We are bombarded with commercials from the dairy industry telling us that milk is one of the best sources of nutrition and is essential for good health. One popular advertising slogan with various pictures: a baby, a muscular man and even Uncle Sam. We have been told cow’s milk is a “perfect food” that helps build healthy bodies and strong bones. Commercials and nutritional guidelines have long us that we should all consume dairy products daily, beginning at birth, as the advertisement in Fig. 1…

Aspergillus nidulans: One of the lesser known pathogen of the aspergilli group, A. nidulans is a model filamentous fungus widely used for studying eukaryotic cell biology (Galagan et al., 2005). A. nidulans possesses a phospholipid-hydrolyzing novel cPLA2 protein, PlaA, which shows maximum similarity to mammalian-type cPLA2 proteins (α, β, γ) (Hong et al., 2005). Like the three isoforms of human cPLA2 proteins, A. nidulans PlaA also consists of two separate catalytic domainsA and B, and…

“If The World Isn’t Broken, Don’t Fix It” In the movie, Jurassic Park, dinosaurs that were extinct millions of years ago were brought back to life. Imagine if our world was like the world in the movie Jurassic Park, where de extinction is reality. Although we do not have the ability to bring the ancient dinosaurs back, we can bring back recently extinct species using their preserved and complete DNA. While some may want to bring extinct animals back, they do not acknowledge what could go wrong,…

Avian Influenza, Leptospirosis, Salmonella, and many more are diseases caused by foodborne illnesses. The safety of our food supply is very important to our nation, and even though it may be hard to believe, a lot of safety concerns with food are often overlooked. Food scares have come and gone for many years in America. Everybody consumes food, some more than others, but the lack of education behind how safe our food actually is, is troubling. Compared to other nations, America has a growing…

all microbes are harmless and many in fact can cause serious damage to plants, animals and humans. A pathogen is anything that can cause a disease or illness to its host and includes worms, bacteria, protozoa, viruses and fungus. This report will focus on food preservation which has been an issue for mankind ever since we started to package food and not eat it straight after we prepared it. The spread of disease is crucial in all aspects of microbiology and aseptic techniques are…

group of blood cancers that, as its name implies, affects AIDS patients. There are various types of non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs) that this category encompasses, so it is not as clear-cut as one might imagine. AIDS-related lymphomas are very complex diseases with many factors to consider. It is important to understand the origin of AIDS-related lymphoma. According to the article “AIDS-Related Malignancies,” AIDS-related lymphoma is believed to be caused by the overproduction of B-lymphocytes, a…

According to the cell theory, the cell is the smallest form of life but there are many parts of a cell which allow the cell to do the job it is assigned correctly. An example of a cell would be the animal cell, which is a eukaryotic cell or a cell that contains a plasma membrane. Inside the membrane there are parts of the cell called the organelles. (Animal Cell Structure, 2005) Organelles inside the cell have specific jobs to perform for the cell, organelles include the ribosomes, vacuoles,…

than that of other mammals (Larson et al.., 2002). The problem of low genetic variations brings the possibility of inbreeding depression and mortality amongst Sea Otters (Larson and Jameson et al.., 2002). In addition to the low genetic variation, diseases are able to run more rampant as it is shown in multiple deaths of California Sea Otters. Of the fresh beachcast carcasses found on beaches sixteen percent of them resulted from a pathogenic parasite. The pathogenic parasite is a parasitic…

to both surface soil and ground soil pollution. Because of low efficiency, fertilizers get accumulated in soil over time and cause ill effect on soil fertility and productivity. Chemicals or salts present in pesticides have also harmful effect on plants and animals when left behind in the soils. These chemicals along with surface runoff or by leaching can reach to water bodies and contaminate drinking…

about three decades, a review of published records showed that the non-O157 STEC were more dominant in beef goods unlike with the E. coli O157. The dominance of the non-O157 STEC was showed in this case study where it ranged from 1.7 to 58% in packing plants, from 3 to 62.5% in supermarkets, and a 3 percent-average in fast food chains. Just recently, in a survey of retail ground beef goods in the US, about 1.9% of sample beef was contaminated with the non-O157 STEC. Another research showed a 10…