Simplified modeling of E. coli mortality after genome damage induced by UV-C light exposure.

UV light is a group of high-energy waves from the electromagnetic spectrum. There are three types of UV radiations: UV-A, -B and -C. UV-C light are the highest in energy, but most are retained by the ozone layer. UV-A and -B reach the earth's surface and cause damage on living organisms, being considered as mutagenic physical agents. Numerous test models are used to study UV mutagenicity; some include special lamps, cell cultures and mathematical modeling. Mercury lamps are affordable and useful sources of UV-C light due to their emission at near the maximum absorption peak of nucleic acids. E. coli cultures are widely used because they have DNA-damage and -repairing mechanisms fairly similar to humans. In here we present two simple models that describe UV-C light incidence on a genome matrix, using fundamental quantum-mechanical concepts and considering light as a particle with a discontinuous distribution. To test the accuracy of our equations, stationary phase cultures of several E. coli strains were exposed to UV-C light in 30 s-intervals. Surviving CFUs were counted and survival/mortality curves were constructed. These graphs adjusted with high goodness of fit to the regression predictions. Results were also analyzed using three main parameters: quantum yield, specific speed and time of mortality.

In silico evaluation of a novel DNA chip based fingerprinting technology for viral identification.

The identification of microorganisms by whole genome DNA fingerprinting was tested "in silico". 94 HPV genome sequences were submitted to virtual hybridization analysis on a DNA chip with 342 probes. This Universal Fingerprinting Chip (UFC) constitutes a representative set of probes of all the possible 8-mer sequences having at least two internal and non contiguous sequence differences between all them. A virtual hybridization analysis was performed in order to find the fingerprinting pattern that represents the signals produced for the hybridization of the probes allowing at most a single mismatch. All the fingerprints for each virus were compared against each other in order to obtain all the pairwise distances measures. A match-extension strategy was applied to identify only the shared signals corresponding to the hybridization of the probes with homologous sequences between two HPV genomes. A phylogenetic tree was constructed from the fingerprint distances using the Neighbor-Joining algorithm implemented in the program Phylip 3.61. This tree was compared with that produced from the alignment of whole genome HPV sequences calculated with the program Clustal_X 1.83. The similarities between both trees are suggesting that the UFC-8 is able to discriminate accurately between viral genomes. A fingerprint comparative analysis suggests that the UFC-8 can differentiate between HPV types and sub-types.