Patients are sometimes blamed for a reduced effect of bleaching when they do not adhere to a dentist's prescribed white diet. This study aimed to determine whether a white diet is necessary by evaluating the effects of coffee, tea, wine, and dark fruits on the potential tooth whitening during the bleaching process. Each of the effects of discoloration was categorized as "yes" or "no" based on a patient questionnaire. Data from five published studies were included in the analyses. Outcomes were based on the color change between baseline and the end of bleaching. The relationships between color changes were measured subjectively and objectively. A nonwhite diet was not significantly associated with less tooth whitening, and there was only a weak positive association between tooth whitening and diet for subjects who drank large amounts of coffee/tea.

The tyrosinase gene (mel), which is responsible for melanin formation, was isolated by shotgun cloning of SalI fragments of Pseudomonas maltophila DNA. A 0.7-kb SalI fragment in the recombinant plasmid pWSY8 imparted the ability to synthesize melanin to an Escherichia coli host HB101. The nucleotide sequence of this DNA fragment revealed an open reading frame of 504 bp, encoding a protein of 169 amino acids. The fragment containing the mel gene was then cloned into an expression plasmid pPAS1 under the control of a promoter isolated from the host, P. maltophilia AT18. This strain increased the melanin production by 70.6% compared with the strain HB101/pWSY8, in which the cloned mel gene was under the control of the lac promoter from the vector pUC18. ß