Summary Insect pests are a major cause of damage of the world's commercially important agricultural crops. Current strategies aimed at reducing crop losses rely primarily on pesticides. One of the commonly used organic zoocides is rotenone. It is used in gardens for both insect control and fish eradication as part of water management. Chronic exposure to rotenone can be toxic to animals and people. It has been shown that rotenone can induce the major symptoms resembling the Parkinson's disease. The scale of both the economic and environmental costs of insect control in agriculture is high. On the other hand, transgenic crops with intrinsic pest resistance offer a promising alternative. The first generation of insect-resistant transgenic plants was based on insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt toxins are part of a large and still growing family of proteins showing insecticidal properties. More than ten cry genes have been transformed into different crops. Plants expressing Bt toxins were among the first biotechnology products to be approved for commercial use. However, the picture is not altogether positive - there is ecological concern of releasing transgenic Bt plants. Are there any unforeseen effects of the toxin on organisms that are not pests of the crop itself ? The issue is discussed in the article.
Summary The use of plants for medicinal purposes dates back thousands years but genetic engineering of plants to produce desired biopharmaceuticals is much more recent. "Molecular farming" is the production of recombinant proteins in plants. It is intended to increase the power of agriculture to cultivate and harvest transgenic plants producing recombinant therapeutics. Molecular farming has the potential to provide diagnostic and therapeutic tools in both health care and the life science. In the past decade, plants have been actively considered as an important expression system and a number of recombinant proteins such as hepatitis B (HbsAg) or cholera toxin B were produced in this system. Plant expression system may be useful for producing pharmaceuticals, as large amount of protein can be produced at a relatively low cost. In addition, plants are capable of complex post-traslationalmodification as that in Eukaryota. Preliminary clinical trials using transgenic lettuce plants expressing hepatitis B virus surface antigen showed encouraging immune response in human volunteers, thus suggesting that humanmay be immunised orally against HBV with plants expressing the viral antigen. Plant - derived biopharmaceuticals are cheap to produce and store, easy to scale up for mass production and safer than those derived from animals. Positive sides as well as possible negative concerns connected with molecular farming are discussed in the article.
The aim of this study was to determine the degree of adhesion and hydrophobicity of some strains of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) with proven antagonistic properties against pathogenic bacteria. Studies were performed using-LAB strains isolated from the gastrointestinal tract of calves and piglets. These strains exhibited an antibacterial activity against pathogenic strains of Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. Cell adhesiveness was examined in relation to the porcine and bovine mucin. Our analyses had shown that the tested microorganisms demonstrated a degree of adhesion in the range of 32.00-40.00% for strains isolated from calves, and 34.00-40.00% for strains isolated from pigs. The hydrophobicity of tested bacteria was in the range of 31.00%-44.00% for strains isolated from pigs, and 26.00%-42.00% for strains obtained from calves. The best mucin adhesion ability was found for bacterial strains belonging to the Enterococcus genus isolated from calves. Taking into account porcine isolates, the best adhesion was observed for the Leuconostoc bacterial strains. Among tested strains, the highest hydrophobicity, measured in relation to hexadecane, was recorded for the bacterial strains belonging to the Leuconostoc sp. isolated from piglets and a of Lactobacillus sp. bacterial strain isolated from calves.
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