مجله بیوتکنولوژی ایران
سال:1392 | دوره:11 | شماره:3 (پیاپی 43) |تعداد مقالات:10

Most recently, we read in the news about sending of ricin-exposed letter to some governmental important people. Ricin is a toxalbumin derived from caster bean (Ricinus communis; Euphorbiaceae), whose oil is employed in medicine. Ricin is a potent and highly dangerous protein, where its exposure can cause severe toxicity in different organs and then death. Because there are many possible ways to expose (including skin, mucosal, gastrointestinal and pulmonary routs) and also regarding to its importance, which is abused as a kind of biological killing weapons, and its potential to affect many people via extremely low dosages, the main headlines attributed to its toxicity signs and symptoms, various probable routs of exposure especially via skin and mucosal contacts have been reviewed here. Nevertheless ricin is an easily produced toxin with known application in biological weapons; it is hard to consider it as a quick bio-killing poison to terror someone via exposed letter.

Dear Editor, The witches’ broom disease of lime trees is a destructing disease caused by the bacterium Candidatus Phytoplasma aurantofolia (1). The disease is prevalent in Oman, United Arab Emirates and Iran. To restrict the spread of the infected trees, detection of the causative bacterium is crucial. Besides PCR-based methods, antibodies can be applied for detection of pathogen-infected cells.

Dear Editor, The recently published articles in the Iranian Journal of Biotechnology inspired us to write this short communication on nitrogen dioxide NO2-philic plants (1).To cope with environmental pollution, we thought (still think) that development of methods that mitigate pollution is an urgent issue, and that NO2-philic plants that can grow with NO2 as the sole nitrogen source are instrumental for the implementation of mitigation of air pollution.