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Despite an expanding array of molecular approaches for detecting microorganisms in a given sample, rapid and robust means of assessing the differential viability of the microbial cells, as a function of phylogenetic lineage, remain elusive. A propidium monoazide (PMA) treatment coupled with downstream quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and(More)
When samples are collected in the field and transported to the lab, degradation of the nucleic acids contained in the samples is frequently observed. Immediate extraction and precipitation of the nucleic acids reduces degradation to a minimum, thus preserving accurate sequence information. An extraction method to obtain high quality DNA in field studies is(More)
Lake Vostok, the 7(th) largest (by volume) and 4(th) deepest lake on Earth, is covered by more than 3,700 m of ice, making it the largest subglacial lake known. The combination of cold, heat (from possible hydrothermal activity), pressure (from the overriding glacier), limited nutrients and complete darkness presents extreme challenges to life. Here, we(More)
Lake Vostok is the largest of the nearly 400 subglacial Antarctic lakes and has been continuously buried by glacial ice for 15 million years. Extreme cold, heat (from possible hydrothermal activity), pressure (from the overriding glacier) and dissolved oxygen (delivered by melting meteoric ice), in addition to limited nutrients and complete darkness,(More)
Ice deposited in Greenland and Antarctica entraps viable and nonviable microbes, as well as biomolecules, that become temporal atmospheric records. Five sections (estimated to be 500, 10,500, 57,000, 105,000 and 157,000 years before present, ybp) from the GISP2D (Greenland) ice core, three sections (500, 30,000 and 70,000 ybp) from the Byrd ice core, and(More)
Clinical diagnoses of fungal infections often rely upon culture techniques followed by microscopic examination of positive cultures and histopathological specimens. Culturing of microorganisms is prone to false negatives, while microscopy methods can be complicated by atypical phenotypes and organisms that are morphologically indistinguishable in tissues.(More)
BACKGROUND Group I introns (specifically subgroup IC1) are common in the nuclear ribosomal RNA genes of fungi. While most range in length from more than 200 to nearly 1800 nucleotides (nt) in length, several small putative (or degenerate) group I introns have been described that are between 56 and 81 nt. Although small, previously we demonstrated that the(More)
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