Metabolic pathway analysis of methane from methanol as substrate in microbial consortium.

Simplified anaerobic digestion (SAD) of substrates facilitates microbial methanogenic pathways. In this study, a methane-producing microbial consortium from cow dung was enriched to determine the metabolism and metabolic pathway in the SAD of methanol. The results showed that methanol as a sole substrate produced 167 mL of methane at 10 days significantly higher than 58 mL, 17.6 mL, and 4 mL generated when methanol was combined with sodium formate, sodium formate alone, or sodium acetate. The relative abundance of Methanobacterium, Candidatus_Methanomethylophilus, Methanomassiliicoccus, and Methanosarcina was increased by 5.96 %, 3.77 %, 2.85 %, and 0.14 % in the methanol substrate of AD, respectively. Macrogenome sequencing indicates that methanol wasconverted into Methyl-CoM in the presence of Methanosarcina, which combines with Coenzyme B to produce methane. This study revealed that methanol is converted into methane by a simple pathway.

A Single-Substrate Biosensor with Spin-Coated Liquid Crystal Film for Simple, Sensitive and Label-Free Protein Detection.

A liquid crystal (LC)-based single-substrate biosensor was developed by spin-coating an LC thin film on a dimethyloctadecyl[3-(trimethoxysilyl)propyl]ammonium chloride (DMOAP)-decorated glass slide. Compared with the conventional sandwiched cell configuration, the simplified procedure for the preparation of an LC film allows the film thickness to be precisely controlled by adjusting the spin rate, thus eliminating personal errors involved in LC cell assembly. The limit of detection (LOD) for bovine serum albumin (BSA) was lowered from 10-5 g/mL with a 4.2-µm-thick sandwiched cell of the commercial LC E7 to 10-7 g/mL with a 4.2-µm-thick spin-coated E7 film and further to 10-8 g/mL by reducing the E7 film thickness to 3.4 µm. Moreover, by exploiting the LC film of the highly birefringent nematic LC HDN in the immunodetection of the cancer biomarker CA125, an LOD comparable to that determined with a sandwiched HDN cell was achieved at 10-8 g/mL CA125 using a capture antibody concentration an order of magnitude lower than that in the LC cell. Our results suggest that employing spin-coated LC film instead of conventional sandwiched LC cell provides a more reliable, reproducible, and cost-effective single-substrate platform, allowing simple fabrication of an LC-based biosensor for sensitive and label-free protein detection and immunoassay.

Fabrication of a Single-Substrate Flexible Thermoresponsive Cholesteric Liquid-Crystal Film with Wavelength Tunability.

Recently, single-substrate flexible liquid crystal (LC) devices have attracted considerable attention because they can provide desirable shapes, small weight, flexibility, and rollability. In this work, we fabricate a flexible single-substrate thermoresponsive cholesteric LC (CLC) film by a facile method called photoenforced stratification method. Our fabricated single-substrate CLC film consists of microscale polymer containers filled with a CLC solution. Our results showed that the temperature response of the fabricated single-substrate CLC film depends on the chiral material doped into the CLC solution. The single-substrate ultrathin CLC film exhibits very high flexibility and robustness without performance reduction. The fabricated flexible single-substrate CLC film may pave the way for the development of novel technologies for thermoresponsive devices with changeable shapes and designs.