scholarly journals Harnessing the Phytase Production Potential of Soil-Borne Fungi from Wastewater Irrigated Fields Based on Eco-Cultural Optimization under Shake Flask Method

Agriculture ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Naila Sadaf ◽  
Muhammad Zulqurnain Haider ◽  
Naeem Iqbal ◽  
Muyassar H. Abualreesh ◽  
Aishah Alatawi

Indigenous fungi present in agricultural soils could have synchronized their inherent potentials to the local climatic conditions. Therefore, the fungi resident in the untreated wastewater irrigated agricultural field might develop their potential for producing various enzymes to handle the induced full organic load from domestic wastewater and toxic chemicals from the textile industry. Around 53 various fungal isolates were grown and separated from the soil samples from these sites through soil dilution, soil-culture plate, and soil-culture plate methods. All the purified fungi were subjected to a phosphatase production test, and only 13 fungal strains were selected as phosphatase producers. Among them, only five fungi identified as Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus fumigatus, Penicillium purourogenum, and Mucor rouxii based on morphological similarities, showing higher phosphate solubilizing indices, were utilized for eco-cultural fine-tuning to harness their full production potential under shake flask (SF) method. Among various media, orchestral tuning, 200 µM sodium phytate as substrate with 1.5 mL of inoculum size of the fungi, pH 7, temperature 30 °C, glucose, and ammonium nitrate as carbon and nitrogen additive with seven days of incubation were found to be the most appropriate cultural conditions to harness the phytase production potential of the selected fungi. Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus showed initial phytase activity (5.2 Units/mL, 4.8 Units/mL) and phytase specific activity (2.85, 2.65 Units/mL per mg protein) during screening to be enhanced up to 17 ± 0.033 (Units/mL), 16 ± 0.033 (Units/mL) and (13 ± 0.012), 10 ± 0.066 (Units/mL per mg protein), respectively, with the above-mentioned conditions. The phytase enzyme produced from these fungi were found to be almost stable for a wide range of pH (4–8); temperature (20–60 °C); insensitive to Ca2+ and Mg2+ ions, and EDTA, Ni2+, and Ba2+ inhibitors but highly sensitive to Mn2+, Cu2+, and Zn2+ ions, and Co2+, Cr3+, Al3+, Fe2+ and Ag1+ inhibitors. It was suggested that both phytase-producing strains of A. niger and A. flavus or their crude phytase enzymes might be good candidates for application in soils to release phosphates from phytate and a possible valuable substitute of phosphate fertilizers.

Author(s):  
Freideriki Michailidou ◽  
Andrea Rentmeister

Enzyme-mediated methylation is a very important reaction in nature, yielding a wide range of modified natural products, diversifying small molecules and fine-tuning the activity of biomacromolecules. The field has attracted...


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaniv Eliezer ◽  
Geyang Qu ◽  
Wenhong Yang ◽  
Yujie Wang ◽  
Hasan Yılmaz ◽  
...  

AbstractA metasurface hologram combines fine spatial resolution and large viewing angles with a planar form factor and compact size. However, it suffers coherent artifacts originating from electromagnetic cross-talk between closely packed meta-atoms and fabrication defects of nanoscale features. Here, we introduce an efficient method to suppress all artifacts by fine-tuning the spatial coherence of illumination. Our method is implemented with a degenerate cavity laser, which allows a precise and continuous tuning of the spatial coherence over a wide range, with little variation in the emission spectrum and total power. We find the optimal degree of spatial coherence to suppress the coherent artifacts of a meta-hologram while maintaining the image sharpness. This work paves the way to compact and dynamical holographic displays free of coherent defects.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taeho Kang ◽  
José Manuel González ◽  
Zi-Qi Li ◽  
Klement Foo ◽  
Peter Cheng ◽  
...  

A versatile method to access differentially substituted 1,3- and 1,4-diamines via a nickel-catalyzed three-component 1,2-carboamination of alkenyl amines with aryl/alkenylboronic ester nucleophiles and N–O electrophiles is reported. The reaction proceeds efficiently with free primary and secondary amines without needing a directing auxiliary or protecting group, and is enabled by fine-tuning the leaving group on the N–O reagent. The transformation is highly regioselective and compatible with a wide range of coupling partners and alkenyl amine substrates, all performed at room temperature. A series of kinetic studies support a mechanism in which alkene coordination to the nickel catalyst is turnover-limiting.


2001 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 741-743 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANTE J. BUENO ◽  
JULIO O. SILVA ◽  
GUILLERMO OLIVER

This article reports on the identification of mycoflora of 21 dry pet foods (12 belonging to dogs and 9 to cats) that corresponded to 8 commercial brands made in Argentina and imported. The isolation frequency and relative density of the prevalent fungal genera are compared too. Ten genera and fungi classified as Mycelia sterilia were identified. The predominant genera were Aspergillus (62%), Rhizopus (48%), and Mucor (38%). The most prevalent among Aspergillus was Aspergillus flavus followed by Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus terreus. The predominant Mucor was Mucor racemosus followed by Mucor plumbeus and Mucor globosus. The moisture content of these foods ranged from 5.6 to 10.0% and from 7.2 to 9.9% for dog and cat foods, respectively. A greater moisture content in food for the senior category (9.5 ± 0.2) was observed only in comparison to adult and kitten/puppy. If the moisture content can be maintained at these levels, mold growth would be prevented or at least it would remain at an insignificant level. Some genera and species isolated and identified from the foods analyzed are potentially producing toxins, which are known as mycotoxins. This involves a risk for animal health.


2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (03) ◽  
pp. 219-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Scollie ◽  
Danielle Glista ◽  
Julie Seto ◽  
Andrea Dunn ◽  
Brittany Schuett ◽  
...  

Background: Although guidelines for fitting hearing aids for children are well developed and have strong basis in evidence, specific protocols for fitting and verifying technologies can supplement such guidelines. One such technology is frequency-lowering signal processing. Children require access to a broad bandwidth of speech to detect and use all phonemes including female /s/. When access through conventional amplification is not possible, the use of frequency-lowering signal processing may be considered as a means to overcome limitations. Fitting and verification protocols are needed to better define candidacy determination and options for assessing and fine tuning frequency-lowering signal processing for individuals. Purpose: This work aims to (1) describe a set of calibrated phonemes that can be used to characterize the variation in different brands of frequency-lowering processors in hearing aids and the verification with these signals and (2) determine whether verification with these signal are predictive of perceptual changes associated with changes in the strength of frequency-lowering signal processing. Finally, we aimed to develop a fitting protocol for use in pediatric clinical practice. Study Sample: Study 1 used a sample of six hearing aids spanning four types of frequency lowering algorithms for an electroacoustic evaluation. Study 2 included 21 adults who had hearing loss (mean age 66 yr). Data Collection and Analysis: Simulated fricatives were designed to mimic the level and frequency shape of female fricatives extracted from two sources of speech. These signals were used to verify the frequency-lowering effects of four distinct types of frequency-lowering signal processors available in commercial hearing aids, and verification measures were compared to extracted fricatives made in a reference system. In a second study, the simulated fricatives were used within a probe microphone measurement system to verify a wide range of frequency compression settings in a commercial hearing aid, and 27 adult listeners were tested at each setting. The relation between the hearing aid verification measures and the listener’s ability to detect and discriminate between fricatives was examined. Results: Verification measures made with the simulated fricatives agreed to within 4 dB, on average, and tended to mimic the frequency response shape of fricatives presented in a running speech context. Some processors showed a greater aided response level for fricatives in running speech than fricatives presented in isolation. Results with listeners indicated that verified settings that provided a positive sensation level of /s/ and that maximized the frequency difference between /s/ and /∫/ tended to have the best performance. Conclusions: Frequency-lowering signal processors have measureable effects on the high-frequency fricative content of speech, particularly female /s/. It is possible to measure these effects either with a simple strategy that presents an isolated simulated fricative and measures the aided frequency response or with a more complex system that extracts fricatives from running speech. For some processors, a more accurate result may be achieved with a running speech system. In listeners, the aided frequency location and sensation level of fricatives may be helpful in predicting whether a specific hearing aid fitting, with or without frequency-lowering, will support access to the fricatives of speech.


Author(s):  
Haidi Hasan Badr ◽  
Nayer Mahmoud Wanas ◽  
Magda Fayek

Since labeled data availability differs greatly across domains, Domain Adaptation focuses on learning in new and unfamiliar domains by reducing distribution divergence. Recent research suggests that the adversarial learning approach could be a promising way to achieve the domain adaptation objective. Adversarial learning is a strategy for learning domain-transferable features in robust deep networks. This paper introduces the TSAL paradigm, a two-step adversarial learning framework. It addresses the real-world problem of text classification, where source domain(s) has labeled data but target domain (s) has only unlabeled data. TSAL utilizes joint adversarial learning with class information and domain alignment deep network architecture to learn both domain-invariant and domain-specific features extractors. It consists of two training steps that are similar to the paradigm, in which pre-trained model weights are used as initialization for training with new data. TSAL’s two training phases, however, are based on the same data, not different data, as is the case with fine-tuning. Furthermore, TSAL only uses the learned domain-invariant feature extractor from the first training as an initialization for its peer in subsequent training. By doubling the training, TSAL can emphasize the leverage of the small unlabeled target domain and learn effectively what to share between various domains. A detailed analysis of many benchmark datasets reveals that our model consistently outperforms the prior art across a wide range of dataset distributions.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabi Socolovsky ◽  
Maoz Shamir

Rhythmic activity in the gamma band (30-100Hz) has been observed in numerous animal species ranging from insects to humans, and in relation to a wide range of cognitive tasks. Various experimental and theoretical studies have investigated this rhythmic activity. The theoretical efforts have mainly been focused on the neuronal dynamics, under the assumption that network connectivity satisfies certain fine-tuning conditions required to generate gamma oscillations. However, it remains unclear how this fine tuning is achieved.Here we investigated the hypothesis that spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) can provide the underlying mechanism for tuning synaptic connectivity to generate rhythmic activity in the gamma band. We addressed this question in a modeling study. We examined STDP dynamics in the framework of a network of excitatory and inhibitory neuronal populations that has been suggested to underlie the generation of gamma. Mean field Fokker Planck equations for the synaptic weights dynamics are derived in the limit of slow learning. We drew on this approximation to determine which types of STDP rules drive the system to exhibit gamma oscillations, and demonstrate how the parameters that characterize the plasticity rule govern the rhythmic activity. Finally, we propose a novel mechanism that can ensure the robustness of self-developing processes, in general and for rhythmogenesis in particular.


Author(s):  
سعاد محمد خليفة أبوالغيث ◽  
أحلام القمودي محمد زعيط

استهدفت هذه الدراسة عزل بعض أنواع الفطريات من التربة الملوثة بالهيدروكربون بمصفاة الزاوية لتكرير النفط، حيث تم عزل وتعريف بعض الفطريات مثل Rhizopus, Aspergillus fumigatus, Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus nidulans وأوضحت نتائج هذه الدراسة أن تواجد وتنوع فطر Aspergillus قد تفوق معنويا مقارنة بتواجد وتنوع فطرRhizopus. كما تم في هذه الدراسة اختبار قدرة وكفاءة الفطريات المعزولة على النمو واستغلال المركبات الهيدروكربونية المتمثلة في زيت الحمادة وزيت الشرارة بتركيز 1% و3%، حيث أوضحت النتائج بأن جنس Rhizopus سجل أعلى معدل للنمو على الوسط الغذائي Malt Extract Agar، وسجل كلا من فطر A. fumigatus وفطر A. flavus معدّل النمو القطري أعلى معنويا من النمو القطري لفطرA. niger  وفطر A. nidulans. هذه المعدّلات العالية تدل على إمكانية استخدام الفطريات المعزولة في المعالجة البيولوجية للتربة الملوّثة بالنفط.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Yuan ◽  
Lei Lin

Satellite image time series (SITS) classification is a major research topic in remote sensing and is relevant for a wide range of applications. Deep learning approaches have been commonly employed for SITS classification and have provided state-of-the-art performance. However, deep learning methods suffer from overfitting when labeled data is scarce. To address this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised pre-training scheme to initialize a Transformer-based network by utilizing large-scale unlabeled data. In detail, the model is asked to predict randomly contaminated observations given an entire time series of a pixel. The main idea of our proposal is to leverage the inherent temporal structure of satellite time series to learn general-purpose spectral-temporal representations related to land cover semantics. Once pre-training is completed, the pre-trained network can be further adapted to various SITS classification tasks by fine-tuning all the model parameters on small-scale task-related labeled data. In this way, the general knowledge and representations about SITS can be transferred to a label-scarce task, thereby improving the generalization performance of the model as well as reducing the risk of overfitting. Comprehensive experiments have been carried out on three benchmark datasets over large study areas. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, leading to a classification accuracy increment up to 1.91% to 6.69%. <div><b>This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.</b></div>


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Grace Purnamasari Christian ◽  
Wahyu Irawati

<p>The post-harvest fungi is one of the greatest cause of various diseases. Particularly, in fungus that infects seeds, the toxic substance called aflatoxin is found. This has caused us to wonder: Has fungi been pathogenic fungi since the beginning of creation? The purpose of this research is to study: 1) The Place of Fungi in God’s Original Creation and the Origin of Pathogenic Fungi, 2) Characterization of post-harvest fungus on corn seeds, 3) Aspergillus sp.’s Structure as Proof of God’s Wonderful Original Creation and Providence, and 4) The factors that contribute to the growth of fungi in post-harvest corn seeds and our responsibility. We conclude that in the beginning, fungi were a part of God’s originally good and perfect creation. These fungi were created by God with the structure and function to support its operation in fulfilling God’s creative purpose. The complex structure of Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus that infected the corn seeds showed God’s providence after the Fall. Pathogenic fungi were the result of the Fall of man into sin. Their growth is caused by the failure to give proper care to the crops. But this should not discourage us since the Bible tells us that God is continually working to restore His creation. Therefore, we are called to be stewards of His creation, to develop and preserve whatever is entrusted in our hands, including the crops for God’s glory and under His authority until He has fully renewed and restored everything.</p><p><strong>BAHASA INDONESIA ABSTRACT:</strong> Jamur pasca panen merupakan salah satu penyebab terbesar timbulnya berbagai penyakit, khususnya disebabkan oleh jamur yang menginfeksi biji-bijian dan menghasilkan substansi beracun disebut dengan aflatoksin. Keadaan ini menimbulkan pertanyaan apakah jamur patogenik ada sejak awal penciptaan? Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mempelajari: 1) Posisi jamur patogenik di awal penciptaan dan asal mula jamur patogenik, 2) karakteristik jamur pasca panen pada biji jagung, 3) struktur <em>Aspergillus</em> sp sebagai bukti dari providensi Allah akan ciptaanNya yang sangat luar biasa, 4) faktor-faktor yang berkontribusi terhadap pertumbuhan jamur pasca panen biji jagung dan Tanggung jawab kita. Dari hasil penelitian ini disimpulkan bahwa pada mulanya, jamur merupakan bagian ciptaan Allah yang sungguh amat baik dan sempurna. Struktur yang kompleks dari <em>Aspergillus niger</em> dan <em>Aspergillus flavus </em>yang menginfeksi biji jagung menunjukkan providensi Allah setelah kejatuhan dosa. Pertumbuhan jamur patogenik merupakan gambaran kejatuhan manusia ke dalam dosa yaitu kegagalan manusia untuk memberikan pemeliharaan yang memadahi pada biji-bijian pasca panen. Namun demikian, keadaan ini tidak mematahkan semangat kita karena Alkitab mengatakan bahwa Allah masih terus bekerja untuk memulihkan ciptaanNya. Oleh karena itu, diharapkan kita semua menjadi pelayan atas ciptaanNya untuk mengembangkan dan menjaga apa yang dipercayakan kepada kita di bawah otoritasNya termasuk biji-bijian untuk memuliakan Allah hingga Dia secara penuh memperbaharui dan memulihkan segala sesuatu</p>


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