Clean water is a necessity for every household, yet water pollution is a serious problem in many parts of the world and plays a major role in compromising water security in the 21st century. In this paper, the authors address the utility of several plants as natural water purifiers. They estimate the effectiveness of duckweed, hyacinth, and azolla in improving the quality of water from the Mithi river in India by measuring several metrics. They conclude that all three plants are effective in improving water quality, suggesting that these plants as eco-friendly options for water treatment.
In this study, the authors address the concerns of heavy metal contamination in industrial and feedlot water waste. They test whether added probiotics are capable of taking up heavy metals in water to attenuate pollution.
Cutibacterium acnes is a bacterium believed to play an important role in the pathogenesis of common skin diseases such as acne vulgaris. Currently, acne is known to be associated with strains from the type IA1 and IC clades of C. acnes, while those from the type IA2, IB, II, and III phylogroups are associated with skin health. This is the first study to explore the sequence space of individual gene products of different C. acnes phylogroups. Our analysis compared the sequence space topology of virulence factors to proteins with unknown functions and housekeeping proteins. We hypothesized that sequence space features of virulence factors are different from housekeeping protein features, which potentially provides an avenue to deduce unknown proteins’ functions. This proposition should be confirmed based on further experimental outcomes. A notable similarity in the sequence spaces’ topological features of previously known as housekeeping proteins encoded by recA and guaA genes to ‘putative virulence’ genes camp2 and tly was observed. Our research suggests further investigation of recA and guaA’s potential virulence properties to better understand acne pathogenesis and develop more targeted acne treatments.
