Nur Hazlin Hazrin-Chong

• PhD, BSc
• Senior Lecturer at National University of Malaysia

Aquaculture is an important component of the world food supply and a significant source of protein. However, this industry faces numerous problems. Including poor fish feed digestion and uneconomic nutrient utilization. This can result in unsatisfactory growth rates and poor stock performance. Utilizing probiotics, which are beneficial microbes tha...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a critical threat to global health and development, with environmental factors—particularly in urban areas—contributing significantly to the spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). However, most research to date has been conducted at a local level, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of the globa...

Hospital environmental surfaces are potential reservoirs for transmitting hospital-associated pathogens. This study aimed to profile microbiomes and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) from hospital environmental surfaces using 16S rRNA amplicon and metagenomic sequencing at a tertiary teaching hospital in Malaysia. Samples were collected from patie...

The Johor Strait separates the island of Singapore from Peninsular Malaysia. A 1-kilometer causeway built in the early 1920s in the middle of the strait effectively blocks water flowing to/from either side, resulting in low water turnover rates and build-up of nutrients in the inner Strait. We have previously shown that short-term rather than seaso...

This review attempts to delineate the effects and roles of fermented foods on allergic responses (AR), specifically from milk, plant, and meat sources. Evidence for AR alleviation and aggravation were noted for many different fermented food groups. Positive outcomes on AR through fermented foods could be linked to microbial hydrolysis of food aller...

The aim of this study was to test the antimicrobial, anti-adhesive and anti-biofilm activities of a rhamnolipid extracted from Pseudomonas aeruginosa UKMP14T previously isolated from oil contaminated soil in Malaysia against ESKAPE (i.e. multidrug resistant) pathogens. Zones of inhibition in an agar well diffusion assay were observed at 50 μg mL-1...

The MetaSUB Consortium, founded in 2015, is a global consortium with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, scientists, bioinformaticians, engineers, and designers, with members from more than 100 countries across the globe. This network has continually collected samples from urban and rural sites including subways and transit systems, sewage sys...

The Johor Strait separates the island of Singapore from Peninsular Malaysia. A 1-kilometer causeway built in the early 1920s in the middle of the Strait effectively blocks water flowing to/from either side, resulting in low water turnover rates and build-up of nutrients in the inner Strait. We have previously shown that short-term rather than seaso...

Cellulose is an essential polymer that is commonly produced from plants and bacteria in a number of industrial processes, such as the biomedical and food industries. While cellulose production from plants is costly, bacterial cellulose (BC) is recognised as one of the best types of cellulose produced. The aim of this study was therefore to generate...

In urban ecosystems, microbes play a key role in maintaining major ecological functions that directly support human health and city life. However, the knowledge about the species composition and functions involved in urban environments is still limited, which is largely due to the lack of reference genomes in metagenomic studies comprises more than...

Bacterial cellulose (BC), a biopolymer, has gained importance in the recent past due to its physicochemical properties, which are desirable for various biotechnology, microbiological, and material science applications. Since cost is a significant limitation in the production of cellulose, there have been efforts to identify potential means of addre...

We present a global atlas of 4,728 metagenomic samples from mass-transit systems in 60 cities over 3 years, representing the first systematic, worldwide catalog of the urban microbial ecosystem. This atlas provides an annotated, geospatial profile of microbial strains, functional characteristics, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) markers, and genetic...

Aims: Rhamnolipids are seeking utmost attention as a new class of biosurfactants having promising potential in diverse fields as they offer a wide range of advantages over chemically synthesised surfactants. However, the high extraction costs make large scale production face difficulty. In present study, hydrocarbon degrading bacteria Pseudomonas a...

Food waste (FW) minimization at the source by using food waste biodigester (FWBs) has a vast potential to lower down the impact of increasing organic fraction in municipal solid waste generation. To this end, this research sought to check the performance of locally isolated hydrolase-producing bacteria (HPB) to improve food waste biodegradation rat...

An essential but missing component in our understanding of microbial interactions leading to coal bed methane (CBM) formation lies in the relationship between coal and coal-adhering microorganisms. Here, we explored the influence of surface physico-chemistry on the microbial cell attachment on coal, utilising a known coal-oxidising bacterium P. flu...

Despite the significance of biogenic methane generation in coal beds, there has never been a systematic long-term evaluation of the ecological response to biostimulation for enhanced methanogenesis in situ. Biostimulation tests in a gas-free coal seam were analysed over 1.5 years encompassing methane production, cell abundance, planktonic and surfa...

Direct analysis of the colonised surface on coal using attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) revealed the nature of bacteria-mediated oxidation at the coal surface. Unique oxidation peaks generated by the presence of Pseudomonas fluorescens on coal was shown through ATR-FTIR measurements, and ATR-FTIR imagi...

The use of hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) as a drying agent was investigated in the specimen preparation for scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging of bacterial surface colonization on sub-bituminous coal. The ability of microbes to biofragment, ferment and generate methane from coal has sparked interest in the initial attachment and colonization...

Nonylphenols (NP) have estrogenic potential because of their phenolic ring, but the organisms involved in the degradation of this alkylated phenol remain unidentified. Using 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA)-based stable isotope probing (SIP) and a new method based on pyrosequencing, we identified the bacteria involved in the degradation of the aromatic rin...