Beighton scores varied across the lifespan and were significantly influenced by age, sex and ethnicity. Assessing GJH using the Beighton scoring system required age- and sex-specific cut-off scores based on the uppermost 5% values. This was confirmed by the low sensitivity, high specificity and 60% false-positive rate if a cut-off of ⩾4 was used for both sexes across the lifespan. To lower the risk of a false-positive diagnosis of GJH, further tests of hypermobility need to be utilized.

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Antibiotic-resistance is ever growing burden on our society for the past many years. Many synthetic chemistry approaches and rational drug-design have been unable to pace up and tackle this problem. Natural resources, more specifically, the microbial diversity, on the other hand, make a traditional and still the best platform to search for new chemical scaffolds and compounds. Here, we report the antimicrobial characteristics of novel bacterial isolate from a salt lake in India. We screened the bacterial isolates for their inhibitory activity against indicator bacteria and found that four novel species were able to prevent the growth of test strains studied in vitro . Further, we characterized one novel species (SMB1 T = SL4-2) using polyphasic taxonomic approaches and also purified the active ingredient from this bacterium. We successfully characterized the antimicrobial compound using mass spectroscopy and amino acid analysis. We also allocated two novel biosynthetic gene clusters for putative bacteriocins and one novel non-ribosomal peptide gene cluster in its whole genome. We concluded that the strain SMB1 T belonged to the genus Paenibacilllus with the pairwise sequence similarity of 98.67% with Paenibacillus tarimensis DSM 19409 T and we proposed the name Paenibacillus sambharensis sp. nov. The type strain is SMB1 T (=MTCC 12884 = KCTC 33895 T ).

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Probiotic industries strive for new, efficient and promising probiotic strains that impart a positive impact on consumer health. Challenges are persisting in isolation, screening, and selection of the new indigenous probiotic strains. In the present research, we explored the probiotic potential of 17 lactic acid bacteria isolated from Yak milk in a series of in vitro tests. We also demonstrated their health benefits, i.e., cholesterol degradation, lactose digestion, antimicrobial activity, antioxidant, and anticancer activities. Principal component analysis revealed that more than 50% of the strains fulfilled the examined criteria, e.g., survival in acidic pH, bile concentrations, and adherent property. Approximately all the strains produced antimicrobial substances against the maximum number of tested strains including clinical strains. Most strains degraded cholesterol in comparison to the reference probiotic strain whereas strain Yc showed 1.5 times higher the degradation efficiency of the control strain. Lan4 strain exhibited remarkable anticancer activity and induced the maximum apoptosis (87%) in the Hela cells and was non-toxic to the non-cancerous HEK293 cells. Around ten strains showed positive lactose digestion. Overall, this can be concluded that selected lactic acid bacteria revealed excellent probiotic properties along with desirable health benefits. These strains need to be further investigated in details for their application in the development of novel probiotic preparations for the improvement of public health.

Aim Rice (Oryza sativa L.) being the most important crop for human population in Asia region, accounts for 23% of the world's caloric intake. Due to the changing climatic conditions, the agricultural crops are experiencing vagaries of the weather more frequently leading to yield losses and even crop failure. The objective of this study was to find out a suitable consortium of bacterial inoculants which can make the crop resilient to drought stress. Methods Bacterial isolates from different habitats were characterized for salt tolerance and multiple plant growth promoting traits. Four separate treatments were formulated, with two treatments having individual bacterial strain as PGPR and the rest two having consortia of three bacterial isolates as PGPR. High yielding variety MTU1010 was selected for pot experiments and treated with individual as well as consortium of isolates. Drought was imposed for 10 days to different batch of the rice crop (variety MTU1010) at two stages of crop growth i.e., pre-flowering and flowering stages. Results Results indicated amelioration of drought stress with higher biomass accumulation, increased grain yield and reversal of stress indicators in plants inoculated with PGPR. The antioxidant enzyme activity of SOD, CAT, and GPOX declined by 24%, 20.5% and 20% in plants treated with bacterial inoculum as compared to uninoculated control. Conclusions This study indicates that the plant beneficial microorganisms can be used to induce systematic tolerance to rice plants under drought stress and furthermore, application of consortium of PGPR has better probability to improve the coping capacity of the plants exposed to stress conditions.