However, nature provides a microbe named Methylibium petroleiphilum strain PM-1, that eats MTBE.
The microbe-munching business is tiny so far, and EBI is the largest of a handful of outfits.
The microbe-free animals were more active and, in specific behavioral tests, were less anxious than microbe-colonized mice.
The woman had succumbed to a resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus, a nasty microbe that causes many respiratory and wound infections.
The graph is color-coded by where on the body a microbe was found, and also by how different they were between people.
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The company has screened thousands of varieties of plant and microbe searching for agents that might help fight inflammation, cancer or diabetes.
Once again, the microbe-free animals proved themselves bolder than their colonized kin.
Yet in the past half-century microbe and plant samples from exotic locales around the world have been one of the richest sources of new drugs.
What comes out is a mess of data, strings of genetic material where it is not always easy to tell what DNA comes from what microbe.
In the heyday of antibiotic discovery, from the 1940s to the early 1960s, drug firms launched dozens of powerful new microbe fighters, many first found in bacteria in the soil.
Molecular biology in action was evident during the use of qPCR tests for this microbe at a site in Southern California, where remediation professionals verified that MTBE degradation was taking place.
By successively disrupting these genes and seeing whether the microbe could stay alive, they have established what must be very close to the minimum set of molecular instructions to sustain life.
Listeria monocytogenes, for example, is a microbe that actually grows happily at refrigerator temperatures and is thus delighted with the new popularity of mass-produced foods that sit on refrigerator shelves in tidy plastic cartons.
Next the company converted the microbe to produce means to create ethanol fuel from plant cellulose, and following scale-up and cost problems, abandoned that dream to focus upon higher cost chemicals used in cosmetics.
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The microbe, discovered by microbiologists from the University of Massachusetts at the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts, digests and ferments a wide variety of feedstocks, including corn stover, corn cobs, switchgrass, and sugar cane bagasse.
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Someday, you might go to the doctor, and the doctor may prescribe a pill, and in that pill may be a microbe or a collection of microbes that have met FDA standards upon which you can make health claims based on that treatment.
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