Redox potential as a controlling factor in enhancing carbon tetrachloride biodegradation

1996 ◽  
Vol 34 (10) ◽  
pp. 59-66
Author(s):  
G. Jin ◽  
A. J. Englande

Biodegradation of hazardous waste is often the most cost-effective technique suitable for purifying large quantities of polluted groundwater and industrial effluents. In an effort of optimizing environmental conditions for microorganisms to degrade carbon tetrachloride, culture redox potential (Eh) was demonstrated as having a critical role. The microorganisms tested were isolated from contaminated field sites and included Pseudomonas cepacia and Providencia stuartii. Ti(III) citrate was used as a reducing agent to poise Eh at designed values. Over 99% degradation of carbon tetrachloride was effected in 3 days at −250 mV ≤ Eh ≤ −200 mV. Lesser rates were observed at Eh ≥ 0 mV. Kinetic analysis indicated that the overall degradation rate constant increased from 2.75×10−3 h−1 to 4.75×10−2 h−1 by controlling Eh at about −200 mV compared with Eh at ≥ 0 mV. Results indicated that the implementation of critical redox potential may be effective in optimizing CT biodegradation activity.

1998 ◽  
Vol 38 (8-9) ◽  
pp. 155-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Jin ◽  
A. J. Englande

Kinetics of Carbon Tetrachloride biodegradation are evaluated in a continuous-flow fixed-biofilm reactor with controlled initial redox potential. The column was seeded with a mixed culture of indigenous microorganisms Pseudomonas cepacia and Providencia stuartii. The fixed biofilm reactor exhibited 98%–99.9% biodegradation of CT introduced into the reactor at an initial concentration of about 200 μg/l for retention times of 1 to 4 days respectively. Four models were employed to evaluate the kinetics of CT biodegradation. These included: Eckenfelder (1989), Arvin (1991), Bouwer and McCarty (1985) and a biphasic model. Comparison of calculated results with observed results between these models agreed very closely to each other (0.968 < R2 < 0.999). Predicted performance was best described by the model of Bouwer and McCarty (1985). However, the biphasic and Eckenfelder models provided excellent correlations and were much simpler to apply. The biphasic model yielded very good correlations of the data for all detention times evaluated; whereas, the Eckenfelder model effected comparable results only at the longer retention times studied.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nidhi Gour ◽  
Bharti Koshti

Aggregation of amyloid beeta 1-42 (Aβ<sub>42</sub>) peptide causes the formation of clustered deposits knows as amyloid plaques in the brain which leads to neuronal dysfunction and memory loss and associated with many neurological disorders including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Aβ<sub>42</sub> has core structural motif with phenylalanine at the 19 and 20 positions. The diphenylalanine (FF) residue plays a crucial role in the formation of amyloid fibers and serves as model peptide for studying Aβ<sub>42 </sub>aggregation. FF self-assembles to well-ordered tubular morphology via aromatic pi-pi stackings. Our studies, suggest that the aromatic rings present in the anti-amyloidogenic compounds may interact with the pi-pi stacking interactions present in the FF. Even the compounds which do not have aromatic rings, like cyclodextrin and cucurbituril show anti-amyloid property due to the binding of aromatic ring inside the guest cavity. Hence, our studies also suggest that compounds which may have a functional moiety capable of interacting with the aromatic stacking interactions might be tested for their anti-amyloidogenic properties. Further, in this manuscript, we have proposed two novel nanoparticle based assays for the rapid screening of amyloid inhibitors. In the first assay, interaction between biotin-tagged FF peptide and the streptavidin labelled gold nanoparticles (s-AuNPs) were used. In another assay, thiol-Au interactions were used to develop an assay for detection of amyloid inhibitors. It is envisaged that the proposed analytical method will provide a simple, facile and cost effective technique for the screening of amyloid inhibitors and may be of immense practical implications to find the therapeutic remedies for the diseases associated with the protein aggregation.


2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (No. 3) ◽  
pp. 97-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Zouhar ◽  
M. Marek ◽  
O. Douda ◽  
J. Mazáková ◽  
P. Ryšánek

<i>Ditylenchus dipsaci</i>, the stem nematode, is a migratory endoparasite of over 500 species of angiosperms. The main method of <i>D. dipsaci</i> control is crop rotation, but the presence of morphologically indistinguishable host races with different host preferences makes rotation generally ineffective. Therefore, a sensitive, rapid, reliable, as well as cost effective technique is needed for identification of <i>D. dipsaci</i> in biological samples. This study describes the development of species-specific pairs of PCR oligonucleotides for detection and identification of the <i>D. dipsaci</i> stem nematode in various plant hosts. Designed DIT-2 primer pair specifically amplified a fragment of 325 bp, while DIT-5 primer pair always produced a fragment of 245 bp in all <i>D. dipsaci</i> isolates. Two developed SCAR primer pairs were further tested using template DNA extracted from a collection of twelve healthy plant hosts; no amplification was however observed. The developed PCR protocol has proved to be quite sensitive and able to specifically detect <i>D. dipsaci</i> in artificially infested plant tissues.


Author(s):  
Allicia Ostoposides Imada ◽  
James J. O’Hara ◽  
Ignacio L. Proumen ◽  
Pablo S. Molinari ◽  
Daniel C. Wascher ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Yahui Long ◽  
Min Wu ◽  
Yong Liu ◽  
Jie Zheng ◽  
Chee Keong Kwoh ◽  
...  

Abstract Motivation Synthetic Lethality (SL) plays an increasingly critical role in the targeted anticancer therapeutics. In addition, identifying SL interactions can create opportunities to selectively kill cancer cells without harming normal cells. Given the high cost of wet-lab experiments, in silico prediction of SL interactions as an alternative can be a rapid and cost-effective way to guide the experimental screening of candidate SL pairs. Several matrix factorization-based methods have recently been proposed for human SL prediction. However, they are limited in capturing the dependencies of neighbors. In addition, it is also highly challenging to make accurate predictions for new genes without any known SL partners. Results In this work, we propose a novel graph contextualized attention network named GCATSL to learn gene representations for SL prediction. First, we leverage different data sources to construct multiple feature graphs for genes, which serve as the feature inputs for our GCATSL method. Second, for each feature graph, we design node-level attention mechanism to effectively capture the importance of local and global neighbors and learn local and global representations for the nodes, respectively. We further exploit multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to aggregate the original features with the local and global representations and then derive the feature-specific representations. Third, to derive the final representations, we design feature-level attention to integrate feature-specific representations by taking the importance of different feature graphs into account. Extensive experimental results on three datasets under different settings demonstrated that our GCATSL model outperforms 14 state-of-the-art methods consistently. In addition, case studies further validated the effectiveness of our proposed model in identifying novel SL pairs. Availability Python codes and dataset are freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/longyahui/GCATSL) and Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/4522679) under the MIT license.


2000 ◽  
Vol 58 (2B) ◽  
pp. 424-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAULO R. M. DE BITTENCOURT ◽  
MARCOS C. SANDMANN ◽  
MARLUS S. MORO ◽  
JOÃO C. DE ARAÚJO

We revised 16 patients submitted to epilepsy surgery using a new method of digital, real-time, portable electrocorticography. Patients were operated upon over a period of 28 months. There were no complications. The exam was useful in 13 cases. The low installation and operational costs, the reliability and simplicity of the method, indicate it may be useful for defining the epileptogenic regions in a variety of circumnstances, including surgery for tumors, vascular malformations, and other cortical lesions associated with seizure disorders.


2010 ◽  
Vol 97-101 ◽  
pp. 3803-3806
Author(s):  
Yong Xiang Hu ◽  
Heng Zhang ◽  
Zheng Qiang Yao

Laser interference micro-structuring is a relatively efficient and cost-effective technique for fabricating periodical micro-nano-structuring surfaces. The direct fabrication of sub-micron sized dot array on silicon was performed by four interfering nanosecond laser beams with a diffractive beam splitter. The mechanism to form the dot array was analyzed and it was found that the obtained conical dot array had a negative shape of the interference pattern of four laser beams. A second-order peak between two first-order peaks also occurred due to the liquid-solid expansion.


2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 126-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
G Michelson ◽  
W Striebel ◽  
W Prihoda ◽  
Volker Schmidt

Glaucoma is one of the most common causes of blindness in the Western world and a major risk factor is increased intra-ocular pressure. We therefore used telemedicine in its control. Patients measured their intra-ocular pressure several times a day with a portable instrument and the values were then entered into a portable digital assistant. These data were transmitted by a modem to a central server. If the intra-ocular pressure was pathologically high, an email message was automatically sent to the ophthalmologist. The pressure curve, including a statistical analysis, was displayed in an easily readable chart format. Ten patients with glaucoma participated in a trial. Self-tonometry with telemedicine enabled continuous evaluation of the patient by the ophthalmologist. This approach offered the advantage of controlling the treatment remotely. Advantages for the patient were that the measurements were easily done at home under normal conditions, and the patient could control when the measurement and data transmission would be performed. Telemedicine is a cost-effective technique enabling the early diagnosis of pathologically increased intra-ocular pressure.


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