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Bacterial production of transparent exopolymer particles during static and laboratory-based cross-flow experiments
No full textOpen Access Article. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.Biofouling of seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) membranes represents one of the leading causes of performance deterioration in the desalination industry. This work investigates the biofouling potential of microbial communities present in a reverse osmosis (RO) feed tank. As an example, water from the RO feed tank of the Penneshaw desalination plant (Kangaroo Island, South Australia) was used in a static biofilm formation experiment. Cultures of the indigenous biofilms formed during the static experiment showed that α-Proteobacteria and γ-Proteobacteria accounted for nearly 80% of the classes of bacteria present in the RO feed tank. Pseudomonas sp. was identified as the major species and isolated for testing in static and laboratory-based cross flow biofilm formation experiments. Results showed that the volume of TEPs generated by Pseudomonas sp. during the laboratory-based cross-flow experiment was 10 fold higher to that produced during the static experiment for the same time period, while both experiments were inoculated with cell concentrations of the same order of magnitude. The availability of nutrients was also shown to be a key driver in TEP production, particularly for the static experiments. This study provides insights into the phenomenon of biofouling by assessing the production of biofouling precursors from one of the main genera of biofilm-forming bacteria, namely Pseudomonas sp
Tabish Khair in Conversation with Ajay K Chaubey
No full textBorn in Ranchi and educated up to his MA in Gaya, Tabish Khair, PhD (Copenhagen), DPhil (Aarhus), is a Professor of English in Denmark and the author of a number of acclaimed books. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, Khair’s novels – The Bus Stopped (2004), Filming (2007) and The Thing About Thugs (2010) – have been shortlisted for awards including the Hindu Prize, Man Asian Prize, DSC Prize for South Asia. His last novel, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, was dubbed the ‘best 9/11 novel’ by the New Republic and ‘unmissable’ by the Times. A study by Khair, The New Xenophobia, will be published by Oxford University Press in January 2016. Professor Khair, while being in Denmark, spoke to me through email promptly and positively on several aspects of diaspora, narratives of migration and rationale of ‘brain-drain’ and the theoretical contours of the Indian diaspora in the wake of multiple terrorist attacks in the West
Good Luck in the New Year
No full textDecember 25th is not a holiday in Japan and usually I spend the day in meetings – in fact, it doesn't feel like Christmas unless I am sitting around a formica table, sipping green tea and discussing enrolment and budget issues with my colleagues.
How to Read Shakespeare while Duck-sitting in Outer Suburbia
No full text'I originally wrote this as a Prologue to a series of three short stories that are part of my dissertation which looks at the cultural capital of reading in contemporary Perth.
Patagonia, Land of Nomads: A Glance at a Territory Shaped by Displacement
No full textBy the end of the nineteenth century, as global voyages became popular, and transcontinental empires settled, remote corners of the third world such as Patagonia began to be explored and became the subject of European travel literatures. The opening of this region to the global scenario produced profound transformations in its territorial conformation, poetic imaginary, and local culture. As Patagonia became a land of travellers, local nomads which had inhabited this land for centuries became extinguished. The historical context of this re-shaping is conceptualised in literary theory through notions such as nomadism, elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and its aesthetical counterpart, geo-poetics, by Kenneth White. The travel literature about Patagonia, such as that produced by Charles Darwin, Lady Florence Dixie, and Bruce Chatwin, depicts the difficulties these travellers faced in trying to endow their writings of adequate descriptions and images. Instead, they recurred to images from their homeland, and thus created an imaginary of Patagonia through displacement: their own, and that of images brought by themselves to this land. When Chilean poets like Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda begun to write about Patagonia, they found it already populated by strange images, shaped indeed, by nomads, travellers and dis-located identities
Towards a New LGBT Biopic: Politics and Reflexivity in Gus Van Sant’s Milk
No full textPost print (Author accepted) manuscript made available here in accordance with publisher copyright policy
National survey data for zoonotic schistosomiasis in the Philippines grossly underestimates the true burden of disease within endemic zones: implications for future control
No full textThis is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).Zoonotic schistosomiasis has a long endemic history in the Philippines. Human mass drug
administration has been the cornerstone of schistosomiasis control in the country for the past three
decades. Recent publications utilizing retrospective national survey data have indicated that the national
human prevalence of the disease is <1%, hence the disease is now close to elimination. However, the
evidence for such a claim is weak, given that less than a third of the human population is currently being
treated annually within endemic zones and only a third of those treated actually swallow the tablets. For
those who consume the drug at the single oral dose of 40 mg/kg, the estimated cure rate is 52% based on a
recent meta-analysis. Thus, approximately 5% of the endemic human population is in reality receiving
the appropriate treatment. To compound this public health problem, most of the bovines in the endemic
communities are concurrently infected but are not treated under the current national control
programme. Given this evidence, it is believed that the human prevalence of schistosomiasis within
endemic regions has been grossly underestimated. Inherent flaws in the reporting of national
schistosomiasis prevalence data are reported here, and the problems of utilizing national retrospective
data in making geographic information system (GIS) risk maps and advising policy makers of the
outcomes are highlighted