Major resections for esophageal, gastric, hepatic, pancreatic, and colorectal cancer continue to be associated with a high peri-operative morbidity of up to 30%–40%. To a large extent, this morbidity is caused by infectious complications that add up to a considerable burden to patients and hospital costs. …

In May 23-29 2016, my colleague Dr. Gerard Parlevliet and myself, Prof. Dr. Willem van Leeuwen, were invited by the Tehran University of Medical Sciences to share information about microbiology and prevention of infections by performing workshops.

In the production of fermented foods, microbes play an important role. Optimization of fermentation processes or starter culture production traditionally was a trial-and-error approach inspired by expert knowledge of the fermentation process. Current developments in high-throughput 'omics' technologies …

Waterborne diseases are posing a constant threat for people. In developing countries there is a lack of microbiologically safe drinking water and in the developed countries there are occasional waterborne disease outbreaks. These diseases are caused by bacteria or parasites which can be found in various …

In this study we tested 39 Lactococcus lactis strains isolated from diverse habitats for their robustness under heat and oxidative stress, demonstrating high diversity in survival (up to 4 log units). Strains with an L. lactis subsp. lactis phenotype generally displayed more-robust phenotypes than strains …

Previous research has shown clinical effectiveness of dermal substitution; however, in burn wounds, only limited effect has been shown. A problem in burn wounds is the reduced take of the autograft, when the substitute and graft are applied in one procedure. Recently, application of topical negative …

In this article, we present CoPub 5.0, a publicly available text mining system, which uses Medline abstracts to calculate robust statistics for keyword co-occurrences. CoPub was initially developed for the analysis of microarray data, but we broadened the scope by implementing new technology and new …

Eight new primer sets were designed for PCR detection of (i) mono-oxygenase and dioxygenase gene sequences involved in initial attack of bacterial aerobic BTEX degradation and of (ii) catechol 2,3-dioxygenase gene sequences responsible for meta-cleavage of the aromatic ring. The new primer sets allowed …

IL-4 and IL-13 are prototypic Th2 cytokines that generate an “alternatively activated” phenotype in macrophages. We used high-density oligonucleotide microarrays to investigate the transcriptional profile induced in human monocytes by IL-13. After 8-h stimulation with IL-13, 142 genes were regulated …

The exploitation of the metagenome for novel biocatalysts by functional screening is determined by the ability to express the respective genes in a surrogate host. The probability of recovering a certain gene thereby depends on its abundance in the environmental DNA used for library construction, the …