Microbiology and Biotechnology Research: An Overview Vol. 11

Livestock under Extreme Heat: Integrating Physiology, Immunity, Gut Microbiota, Genetics and Precision Cooling for Climate Adaptation

2026-09-26T10:06:14+00:00

Extreme heat is becoming a recurrent rather than exceptional constraint on livestock production, health and welfare. Its biological effects extend well beyond depressed feed intake: thermal load changes heat exchange, endocrine and energetic metabolism, immune regulation, intestinal barrier function, microbial ecology, reproduction and development, while susceptibility differs markedly among species, breeds, life stages and production levels. This critical narrative review integrates evidence on five domains that are often treated separately: whole-animal physiology, immunity, gut and rumen microbiota, genetic thermotolerance, and precision detection and cooling. Literature published principally from 2010 through 5 July 2026 was appraised, with seminal earlier work retained where it established concepts still used in heat-tolerance phenotyping. The strongest causal evidence supports direct metabolic and intestinal consequences of hyperthermia that are not explained by reduced nutrient intake alone, and direct cooling remains the most immediately effective adaptation for intensively managed cattle. Immune responses are better characterised as dysregulation than uniform suppression because glucocorticoid-associated impairment can coexist with inflammatory activation, epithelial leakage and altered pathogen defence. Heat-associated microbiome shifts are biologically plausible and repeatedly observed, especially in poultry and increasingly in ruminants, but taxon-level signatures are inconsistent and causal intervention evidence remains weaker than evidence for barrier disruption. Genetic studies demonstrate heritable variation in heat response, genotype-by-environment interaction and the practical value of genomic selection; the SLICK phenotype provides a major-gene proof of concept, but polygenic selection and functional resilience phenotypes remain necessary. Precision livestock technologies can move heat management from environment-only thresholds towards animal-centred, anticipatory control, yet external validation, sensor interoperability, water and energy efficiency, and welfare-centred endpoints remain limiting. The evidence supports a layered climate-adaptation strategy in which genetics lowers baseline susceptibility, monitoring detects individual thermal strain, targeted cooling prevents damaging hyperthermia, and nutritional or microbiome interventions are used as complementary rather than primary controls.

Engineering the Plant–Soil Microbiome for Climate-Resilient Agriculture: From Multi-Omics to Synthetic Microbial Communities

2026-09-26T10:13:37+00:00

Climate change exposes crops to recurrent drought, heat, salinity and interacting biotic stresses while simultaneously altering the soil microbial communities on which plant nutrition and stress adaptation partly depend. Plant–soil microbiome engineering has therefore moved from descriptive community profiling towards interventions that seek to steer microbial functions, yet the evidential chain from association to reliable field performance remains incomplete. This critical narrative review evaluates how multi-omics, host-mediated microbiome selection, microbial inoculation and synthetic microbial communities (SynComs) can be integrated into a mechanistically grounded strategy for climate-resilient agriculture. Literature published from 2012 to 5 July 2026 was evaluated, with earlier foundational work included where necessary. The strongest evidence shows that plant genotype, root metabolites, nutrient status, immune signalling and environmental stress jointly structure root-associated microbiota, and that drought and temperature perturbations can reproducibly reorganise bacterial communities. Multi-omics can connect these compositional shifts to transcriptional and metabolic activity, but relative-abundance bias, compositionality, protocol dependence and weak temporal resolution constrain causal inference. SynComs address part of this problem by enabling controlled perturbation, strain drop-out and reconstitution experiments; studies in Arabidopsis and crop systems demonstrate priority effects, keystone-like interactions, interkingdom control and context-dependent protection against drought or salinity. Translation remains limited by colonisation failure, resident-community resistance, genotype-by-environment interactions, formulation, ecological safety and the scarcity of multi-site field validation. The review argues that microbiome engineering should be treated as an iterative design–build–test–learn process in which multi-omics discovers candidate functions, culture collections and modelling define testable communities, mechanistic experiments establish causality, and staged field trials determine durability. Climate resilience is most likely to emerge from context-aware, functionally redundant and monitorable plant–microbe systems rather than universal microbial products.

Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Omics and Genome Editing for Climate-Resilient Crops: A Critical Synthesis of Convergent Innovation from Stress Discovery to Evidence-Tested Crop Improvement

2026-09-26T10:17:35+00:00

Climate-resilient crop improvement is constrained less by the absence of candidate genes than by weak connections among target-environment definition, molecular evidence, predictive modelling and field validation. This critical narrative review examines how artificial intelligence, multi-omics and genome editing can be combined without treating technological convergence as evidence of agronomic effectiveness. Literature published from 1 January 2010 to 4 July 2026 was selected through transparent searches of open scholarly databases and citation networks, with priority given to peer-reviewed primary studies, influential methods papers and high-quality reviews. Artificial intelligence and machine learning improve image-based phenotyping, genotype-by-environment prediction and prioritisation of complex molecular features, but performance is frequently inflated by non-independent validation, population structure, small training sets and environmental domain shift. Multi-omics can expose regulatory modules and stress-responsive pathways, yet integration remains vulnerable to batch effects, temporal mismatch, tissue averaging and correlations that do not establish causality. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and associated genome-editing systems provide efficient routes from candidate targets to altered alleles, including multiplex, base- and prime-editing strategies; nevertheless, transformation dependence, polyploid redundancy, pleiotropy and weak multi-environment testing limit translation. The strongest evidence arises when environmental characterisation, phenomics and genomic prediction are connected to experimentally testable targets and edited lines are evaluated against elite comparators under realistic single and combined stresses. A convergence framework is proposed in which field data recursively update trait definitions and models, while causal perturbation tests the biological interpretations generated from multi-modal data. Near-term progress depends on prospective validation, pangenome-aware models, shared metadata standards, independent field networks and explicit product profiles. Convergence can shorten some stages of crop improvement, but climate resilience remains a systems property that must be demonstrated across environments, management regimes and seasons rather than inferred from molecular or computational performance alone.

Prevalence of Fungal Contamination and Insect Pest Infestation in Stored Agricultural Products and their Implications for Food Safety in Eritrea

2026-09-26T10:21:13+00:00

Stored-product insects and mould fungi can interact to reduce grain quantity, seed viability, market quality, and food safety. This study evaluated farmer storage practices in Eritrea and assessed the occurrence of insect pests and fungal contaminants in stored cereals and pulses. Semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, and field observations were combined with laboratory assessment of grain damage, germination, and fungal contamination on potato dextrose agar. Farmers used several traditional storage systems, including koffo, maeken, shirfa, wia/suga, birrob, gufet, meshemae, and underground stores. Most respondents stored grain primarily for household food (77.7%), while 15.2% stored grain for later sale and 7.2% for seed. Respondents identified storage as the major stage at which infestation or contamination became evident (74.8%). The principal insect pests were Sitophilus spp., Sitotroga cerealella, Callosobruchus spp., and Tribolium castaneum. Fungal analysis detected Penicillium spp. (89.0%), Aspergillus spp. (76.3%), Fusarium verticillioides (63.2%), Alternaria spp. (14.6%), and less frequent Cladosporium, Ulocladium, and Stemphylium spp. Pest-associated weight loss ranged from 4.37-13.69% in cereals and 8.89-26.70% in pulses. Damaged seed lots generally showed markedly lower germination than undamaged lots. Poorly ventilated containers showed substantially greater fungal incidence (75-92%) than ventilated containers (8-25%). The presence of potentially mycotoxigenic fungi, particularly A. flavus and F. verticillioides, indicates a potential food-safety hazard; however, this study did not chemically quantify mycotoxins. Improved pre-storage drying, sanitation, insect management, moisture control, and appropriately designed hermetic or ventilated storage systems are recommended, together with routine mycotoxin surveillance.

Copper Nanoparticles in Conservative Dentistry and Endodontics- A New Frontier in Antimicrobial Innovation: A Comprehensive Review

2026-09-26T10:33:08+00:00

Nanotechnology has emerged as a promising field in restorative and endodontic dentistry, with copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) and copper oxide nanoparticles (CuO NPs) attracting considerable attention due to their affordability, wide-spectrum antimicrobial activity, and compatibility with dental materials. This narrative review compiles the current literature on the fundamentals, synthesis, characterisation and antimicrobial mechanisms of copper nanoparticles with particular emphasis on applications in conservative dentistry and endodontics. Copper nanoparticles are known to exert antimicrobial properties via membrane disruption, generation of reactive oxygen species, protein dysfunction and nucleic acid damage. They are effective against important pathogens like Streptococcus mutans and Enterococcus faecalis. When incorporated into restorative composites, dentin bonding adhesives, intracanal medicaments, irrigant adjuncts, root canal sealers, and gutta-percha coatings, they have demonstrated the potential to confer antimicrobial benefits while largely preserving mechanical and physicochemical properties at optimised concentrations. The narrow therapeutic window between antimicrobial efficacy and cytotoxicity, the heterogeneity of the studies performed, and the limited clinical-trial data suggest that copper-nanoparticle-based materials remain preclinical, behind more established silver- and zinc-oxide-based materials. The review emphasizes the requirement for standardised protocols for the synthesis and testing of these particles, and well-designed clinical studies before copper nanoparticles can be considered for routine clinical use in conservative and endodontic practice.

MADS-Box Gene Overexpression for Early Flowering in Fruit Trees: Selected Case Studies

2026-09-26T10:38:59+00:00

Woody fruit trees have prolonged juvenile phases that substantially slow conventional breeding and delay the development of improved cultivars. This review evaluates selected case studies in which MADS-box gene overexpression was used to induce early flowering and shorten breeding cycles in apple, European pear and citrus. Particular emphasis is placed on the APETALA1/FRUITFULL clade and the silver birch BpMADS4 gene. In apple, constitutive BpMADS4 overexpression reduced a juvenile period of 4–5 years to less than 6 months and supported rapid cycle breeding in which four backcross generations were completed within 7 years. In European pear, BpMADS4-induced flowering occurred within 6–18 months after grafting, while transformed lines retained a comparatively normal tree-like architecture. In citrus, overexpression of Arabidopsis APETALA1 enabled fertile flowering in the first year after transformation while retaining environmentally responsive seasonal flowering. Collectively, these cases show that MADS-box-mediated flowering acceleration can substantially reduce generation time, although phenotypic outcomes vary among species. Important constraints include species-specific growth responses, transformation efficiency, environmental and rootstock effects, containment requirements, regulatory considerations and public acceptance. Integration with marker-assisted and genomic selection, together with gene-editing approaches, may further strengthen rapid-cycle breeding strategies. Overall, MADS-box-induced early flowering represents a promising approach for accelerating genetic improvement in perennial fruit crops while requiring careful species-specific evaluation.