Investigating oxidative stress and large-scale genomic reduction in Vibrio natriegens through the development and application of new genetic techniques

Vibrio natriegens is the fastest replicating bacterium and recent work has demonstrated its potential for biotechnology and synthetic biology applications. While these industries have been the focus of V. natriegens research, it offers a promising system for diverse laboratory studies. However, currently a complete understanding of V. natriegens biology is lacking. As such, there is a need to advance genetic techniques and physiological understanding to better inform all aforementioned applications. Here we describe our contributions to the growing field of V. natriegens genetics and the application of these new techniques to study physiological processes and themes in genome evolution. Briefly, we performed a case study on a set of physiologically important genes natively found in V. natriegens genome, called katG1, katG2, and katG3, whose function is to protect the cell from oxidative stress. We report functional and phylogenetic analyses that inform the evolutionary and ecological basis for katG multiplicity in V. natriegens. We next expand our analysis to investigate generalized genome reduction as a simulation of genome streamlining. Genome streamlining theory posits that reduction of DNA content is selectively advantageous under persistent nutrient limitation. V. natriegens has an expansive genome and we leverage this characteristic and apply our new genetic techniques to investigate the physiological impacts of large-scale genomic reductions under theoretically relevant conditions. Together the work presented here expands the capabilities and understanding of V. natriegens has a host for molecular biology

Comparing consumer perceptions of appliances' electricity use to appliances' actual direct-metered consumption

Many strategies for reducing residential energy consumption—including product labelling programs, subsidies for the purchase of efficient devices, behavioral programs that encourage efficient energy use, and others—rely on building owners and end users to make informed investment and operational decisions. These strategies may be ineffective if consumers are unaware of how much electricity is used by different devices in their homes and buildings. This study therefore compares consumers' perceptions of their appliances' electricity use to these appliances' actual direct-metered electricity consumption. Using an online survey, 118 homeowners from Austin, Texas were asked to estimate the energy consumption of six household devices which were monitored in the participants' homes. Homeowners were randomly assigned to assess their appliance-specific electricity use in terms of energy units (kWh/month) or energy cost units ($/month) for an average summer month. Consistent with previous studies, participants overestimated the energy consumed by their low energy consuming devices and slightly underestimated that of their most energy-consuming device. Results also showed that responses of the experimental groups estimating their consumption in energy units and energy cost units were similar, the accuracy of the two groups' perceptions was similar, and levels of confidence in the two groups were similar. These results suggest that targeted information campaigns focused on air conditioning energy consumption and device power reduction opportunities could improve consumer decision-making to save energy and reduce demand