Potential of Moringa Oleifera Seed as a Natural Adsorbent for Wastewater Treatment

The present study deals with the appropriateness of the coagulation process using natural coagulant Moringa oleifera seed. Natural coagulants are useful for the treatment of wastewater because of its sustainability, cost-effectiveness, non-toxicity and lesser quantity of sludge formation. M. oleifera seed having a chemical composition of polypeptides having 6 amino acids like arginine acid, methionine acid, glutamic acid, phenylalanine, threonine, and histidine. M. oleifera is also known as a cationic polyelectrolyte and having molecular weight 6,000 to16,000 Dalton. The main objective of research work is the application of the M. oleifera seed as a natural adsorbent to treat synthetic dairy wastewater. The effects of pH, agitation time, the dose of sorbent and efficacy of M. oleifera seeds kernel for turbidity removal was assessed. M. oleifera seed eliminates turbidity 95 % and colour 94 % using 0.22 gm pod powder, and 0.2 L of 1.0 g/L synthetic dairy wastewater. Naturally dried M. oleifera seeds remove turbidity 95 %, sundried seeds remove turbidity 52 % and oven-dried seeds 45 %. As naturally dried M. oleifera pod having more surface area for adsorption and inter-particulate bridging which extract the extra active ingredients. pH range between 5 and 8 is more suitable to degrade the turbidity and colour. It is concluded that in the presence of an aqueous soluble cationic coagulant protein has great potential to remove the turbidity and colour of wastewater. HIGHLIGHTS oleifera seed having a chemical composition of polypeptides having 6 amino acids like arginine acid, methionine acid, glutamic acid, phenylalanine, threonine, and histidine oleifera seeds consist of crude fiber, lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose. It also contains amino functional groups (R-NH3), carboxyl group (C=O), and fiber carbonaceous. The functional group present in M. oleifera seeds is dissociated during the adsorption process at various pH oleifera has good property of coagulation-flocculation (C-F) The effectiveness of naturally dried seed kernel is more effective than other seed kernels GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Promoting Cell Growth And Poly-Y-Glutamic Acid Production By Boosting The Synthesis of Alanine And D-Alanyl-D-Alanine In Bacillus Licheniformis

Objective: The production of some bio-chemicals affected by the cell growth. This study aimed at promoting the cell growth by overexpressing the synthesis of peptidoglycans tetrapeptide tail components to improve poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) production. Results: L-alanine, D-alanine and D-alanyl-D-alanine are primary precursors for the synthesis of peptidoglycans. The addition of L-alanine and D-alanine significantly increased both the cell growth and production of γ-PGA. Then, several genes encoding key enzymes for L/D-alanine and D-alanyl-D-alanine biosynthesis were overexpressed respectively, including ald (encoding alanine dehydrogenase), dal (encoding alanine racemase) and ddl (encoding D-alanine ligase). The results showed that the overexpression of genes ald , dal and ddl increased the production of γ-PGA by 19.72%, 15.91% and 60.90%, and increased the microbial biomass by 15.58%, 18.34% and 49.85%, respectively. Moreover, we demonstrated that the overexpression of genes ald , dal and ddl increased γ-PGA production mainly by enhancing cell growth rather than providing more precursors. Conclusions: This work illustrated the importance of the L/D-alanine and D-alanyl-D-alanine synthesis to the cell growth and the high yield of γ-PGA, and provided an effective strategy for producing γ-PGA .

Thermal-induced transformation of glutamic acid to pyroglutamic acid and self-cocrystallization: a charge–density analysis

Thermal-induced transformation of glutamic acid to pyroglutamic acid is well known. However, confusion remains over the exact temperature at which this happens. Moreover, no diffraction data are available to support the transition. In this article, we make a systematic investigation involving thermal analysis, hot-stage microscopy and single-crystal X-ray diffraction to study a one-pot thermal transition of glutamic acid to pyroglutamic acid and subsequent self-cocrystallization between the product (hydrated pyroglutamic acid) and the unreacted precursor (glutamic acid). The melt upon cooling gave a robust cocrystal, namely, glutamic acid–pyroglutamic acid–water (1/1/1), C5H7NO3·C5H9NO4·H2O, whose structure has been elucidated from single-crystal X-ray diffraction data collected at room temperature. A three-dimensional network of strong hydrogen bonds has been found. A Hirshfeld surface analysis was carried out to make a quantitative estimation of the intermolecular interactions. In order to gain insight into the strength and stability of the cocrystal, the transferability principle was utilized to make a topological analysis and to study the electron-density-derived properties. The transferred model has been found to be superior to the classical independent atom model (IAM). The experimental results have been compared with results from a multipolar refinement carried out using theoretical structure factors generated from density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Very strong classical hydrogen bonds drive the cocrystallization and lend stability to the resulting cocrystal. Important conclusions have been drawn about this transition.

Dietary l-glutamic acid N,N-diacetic acid improves short-term maintenance of zinc homoeostasis in a model of subclinical zinc deficiency in weaned piglets

This study compared the Zn response in selected tissues of weaned piglets fed L-glutamic acid, N,N-diacetic acid (GLDA), while challenged with short-term subclinical Zn deficiency (SZD). During a total experimental period of eight days, 96 piglets were fed restrictively (450 g/d) a high phytate (9 g/kg) diet containing added Zn at 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 45 and 75 mg/kg with and without 200 mg/kg of GLDA. No animals showed signs of clinical Zn deficiency and no phenotypical differences were observed. Broken line analysis of Zn status parameters such as liver Zn and apparently absorbed Zn indicated that the gross Zn requirement threshold was around 55 mg/kg diet. Supplementation of Zn above this threshold led to a saturation of the response in apparently absorbed Zn and linear increase in liver Zn. Bone and serum Zn responded to the dose in a linear fashion, likely due to the time-frame of Zn homoeostatic adaptation. Inclusion of GLDA into the diets yielded a higher intercept for bone Zn (P < 0·05). Liver Zn accumulation and MT1A gene expression was higher for piglets receiving GLDA (P < 0·05), indicating higher Zn influx. This study indicates that a strong chelator such as GLDA mitigates negative effects of phytate in plant-based diets, by sustaining Zn solubility, thereby improving nutritional Zn availability.

Using sheep selection to improve the nutritional value of lambmeat

Relevance. The article provides a justification for the use of sheep selection taking into account the intra-breed type of Prekos ewes in purebred breeding and crossing with producers of semi-fine wool breeds Romney-Marsh and Kuibyshevskaya to improve the biological usefulness of meat in offspring.Methods: scientific and economic experiment in the use of different selection options, taking into account the productive type of sheep of the Precos breed.Results. The article presents the results of a study on the influence of the selection of sheep on the composition of lambmeat, increasing the usefulness and quality of meat and, thus, the efficiency of its production. It was found that the content of water in the meat of crossbred animalswas lower compared to purebred Precos. There is a lower water content in the meat of rams obtained from sheep of the Precos meat-wool type, both in purebred and crossbred animals. In terms of the protein content in meat, there is an advantage in rams with purebred breeding and crossing compared to meat obtained from the wool-meat type of queens. In the hip bran of purebred animals and crossbreeds with the Kuibyshev breed, this superiority was 1.1% (Р > 0.95), and in the lumbar bran of Romney-Marsh crossbreeds, this difference was 1.6% (Р > 0.95). Mutton from the offspring of the sheep of meat-wool type is characterized by a significantly high content of the essential amino acids threanine, lysine, leucine, phenylanin and isoleucine in comparison with meat from the offspring of the wool-meat type of sheep. A significant superiority was also established in the content of interchangeable amino acids — oxyproline, serine, tyrosine, proline, glycine, aspartic and glutamic acid, cystine and analin.

Construction of a Mutant Bacillus Subtilis Strain for High Purity Poly-γ-Glutamic Acid Production

Purpose To construct a Bacillus subtilis strain for improved purity of poly-γ-glutamic acid. Results The construction of strain GH16 was achieved by knocking out five extracellular protein genes and an operon from Bacillus subtilis G423. Then we analyzed the protein content in the γ-PGA produced by the resultant strain GH16/pHPG which decreased by 6.08%. Subsequently the fla-che operon, PBSX and the yrpD, ywoF and yclQ genes were knocked out successively and the mutant strain GH17, GH18, and GH19 was obtained. Ultimately, the protein content was reduced by 43.9%. In addition, the polysaccharide content in the γ-PGA was decreased from 2.21–1.93% due to the epsA-O operon was knocked. Conclusion γ-PGA has potential applications as a drug carrier, sustained-releasing agent and medical composite in medicine. To our knowledge, this is the first report of engineered Bacillus subtilis strains which can produce γ-PGA with a purity higher than 97%. Our results confirmed that this upstream strategy significantly enhanced specific protein purity by the removal of extracellular protein genes in Bacillus subtilis, and it is promising in other protein purification.

Computational identification of 4-carboxyglutamate sites to supplement physiological studies using deep learning

In biological systems, Glutamic acid is a crucial amino acid which is used in protein biosynthesis. Carboxylation of glutamic acid is a significant post-translational modification which plays important role in blood coagulation by activating prothrombin to thrombin. Contrariwise, 4-carboxy-glutamate is also found to be involved in diseases including plaque atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, mineralized heart valves, bone resorption and serves as biomarker for onset of these diseases. Owing to the pathophysiological significance of 4-carboxyglutamate, its identification is important to better understand pathophysiological systems. The wet lab identification of prospective 4-carboxyglutamate sites is costly, laborious and time consuming due to inherent difficulties of in-vivo, ex-vivo and in vitro experiments. To supplement these experiments, we proposed, implemented, and evaluated a different approach to develop 4-carboxyglutamate site predictors using pseudo amino acid compositions (PseAAC) and deep neural networks (DNNs). Our approach does not require any feature extraction and employs deep neural networks to learn feature representation of peptide sequences and performing classification thereof. Proposed approach is validated using standard performance evaluation metrics. Among different deep neural networks, convolutional neural network-based predictor achieved best scores on independent dataset with accuracy of 94.7%, AuC score of 0.91 and F1-score of 0.874 which shows the promise of proposed approach. The iCarboxE-Deep server is deployed at https://share.streamlit.io/sheraz-n/carboxyglutamate/app.py.

Evaluation of the Heat Produced by the Hydrothermal Liquefaction of Wet Food Processing Residues and Model Compounds

Hydrothermal liquefaction has proven itself as a promising pathway to the valorisation of low-value wet food residues. The chemistry is complex and many questions remain about the underlying mechanism of the transformation. Little is known about the heat of reaction, or even the thermal effects, of the hydrothermal liquefaction of real biomass and its constituents. This paper explores different methods to evaluate the heat released during the liquefaction of blackcurrant pomace and brewers’ spent grains. Some model compounds have also been evaluated, such as lignin, cellulose and glutamic acid. Exothermic behaviour was observed for blackcurrant pomace and brewers’ spent grains. Results obtained in a continuous reactor are similar to those obtained in a batch reactor. The heat release has been estimated between 1 MJ/kg and 3 MJ/kg for blackcurrant pomace and brewers’ spent grains, respectively. Liquefaction of cellulose and glucose also exhibit exothermic behaviour, while the transformation of lignin and glutamic acid present a slightly endothermic behaviour.