Evaluation of Microalgae’s Plastic Biodeterioration Property by a Consortium of Chlorella sp. and Cyanobacteria sp.

Malaysia is one of the top eight countries that has a drawback of mismanaged plastic waste. This study intended to investigate polymer degradation using the biological technique with the help of microalgae to minimise the time required for biodegradation. This research article aims to identify the collected sample with the most suitable microalgae for the biodegradation of microplastic and to analyse the biodegradation of the polymer by microalgae. The results revealed that the consortium of Chlorella sp. and Cyanobacteria sp. were able to deteriorate low-density polyethene (LDPE sample) through several stages, and this was confirmed by UV-Spec, FESEM, EDX, CHNO, FTIR and DSC analysis. The results obtained revealed that microalgae producing exopolysaccharides (EPS) decreased the carbon and oxygen ratio. According to SEM micrographs, microalga may colonise, agglomerate, and adhere microplastics to its surface, regardless of its fractional size. The EDX analysis showed that the initial composition of carbon was 92.30 ± 1.23 %, while after the incubation, the carbon composition started decreasing from 53.18 % to 39.12 ± 1.08 %. Finally, there was a 37.91 % decrease in carbon weight from elemental analysise

Should Calibration Curve Retire From Real-Time PCR Assays?

Real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR) is a biological technique that collects data of target nucleotides as PCR occurs by integrating fluorescent dyes as visual indicators into the amplification cycles. This enables the detection and quantification of the DNA segments in a sample through measurements of the fluorescent's intensity. The cycle threshold (Ct) is defined as the number of cycles required for the fluorescent signal to pass a specified threshold and is inverse to the copy number, the initial number of nucleotides in the sample. Calibration curves are commonly used to approximate the copy numbers of experimental samples using standards with known copy numbers. This study is a retrospective review of historical data to help evaluate the efficacy and accuracy of calibration curves in a real-time PCR assay which have been used for screening of a genetic disorder in laboratories. The hypothesis is that including calibration curves in real-time PCR assays may decrease the screening specificity and accuracy, resulting in more false positives and additional retests. Three different scenarios were designed to replay the historical data and evaluate the relative accuracy of assays without calibration curves. The outcomes of all the scenarios conclude that calibration curves are not helpful for detecting target DNA fragments with low copy numbers, suggesting a reconsideration of their implantation in real-time PCR assays.

AN OVERVIEW OF SILVER NANOPARTICLES

During the past few years, silver nanoparticles became one amongst the foremost investigated and explored technology derived nanostructures, given the fact that nano silver primarily based materials established to possess attention-grabbing, challenging, and inspiring characteristics appropriate for numerous applications. Generation after generation, the postulates come back forth regarding properties of silver for the traditional Greeks cook from silver pots and the recent saying “born with silver spoon in his mouth” so show that ingestion with a silver spoon was renowned as uncontaminated. Silver has an excessive amount of contemporary industrial uses and is considered as a store of wealth. Silver nanoparticles are unit one amongst the foremost very important and interesting nano materials among many metals like nanoparticles. they need been urban as a complicated unit within the field of nanotechnology. This review predominately focused on advantages and synthesis of silver nanoparticles using physical, chemical, and biological ways. However, physical, and chemical methods are harmful and expensive however the biological technique is easy, rapid, non- noxious and ecofriendly. It additionally explains regarding mechanism of action, numerous characterization techniques as well as UV- Visible Spectroscopy, Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, X- ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS), Zeta Potential and finally concluded with numerous applications.

Cultivation of housefly larvae (Musca domestica L.) as a biological method to enrich rice straw and maximise its utilisation

This study is aimed at presenting a new biological technique to enrich rice straw via the cultivation of Musca domestica (MD) and at evaluating the outcome of this technique using in vitro and in vivo studies. Rice straw was treated using molasses and water at 17.5: 0.375: 7.0 (w/v/v), respectively. The mixture was left in an open shaded area for 11 successive days to allow MD to lay eggs and produce larvae. During this time, the recorded temperature was 35.6±2.2 °C and the humidity was 49±5.7%. Rice straw treated with 4% urea (URS) and untreated rice straw (RS) were used for comparison with in vitro and in vivo MD maggot rice straw (MRS). The crude protein (CP) and ether extract (EE) contents gradually increased during the first 8 days, and then began to gradually decrease until the 11th day. In vitro studies were performed on RS, MRS and URS as a single substrate. Instead, in the in vivo studies, experimental RS was offered ad libitum to sheep, and a concentrate feed mixture was provided as pellets to cover the maintenance requirements. The volume of produced gas and the in vitro degradability of the organic matter (OM), ash-free neutral detergent fibre, and CP (P<0.05) increased with the fermentation of the mg of MRS, compared to URS, which in turn was (P<0.05) higher than that of RS incubation. The consumed MRS was significantly (P<0.05) higher than the consumed URS. At the same time, the URS consumption was highly (P<0.05) significant, compared to the RS consumption. The eating, ruminating and chewing time (min/head/d) was significantly (P<0.05) higher when RS was consumed, compared to URS and MRS. Eating a diet including MRS led to higher (P<0.05) dry matter, OM, CP, EE, neutral detergent fibre, and acid detergent fibre digestibility, than the diet containing URS, which was significantly (P<0.05) superior to the diet containing RS. The total digestible nutrients (TDN) and digestible crude protein values of the MRS-containing diet improved (P<0.05) more than that of URS, which was significantly (P<0.05) higher than RS. In short, the results indicate that MD maggots could be produced on rice straw to elevate the protein content and nutritional value of feeds. Moreover, this technique improved the feed consumption and digestion coefficients more than the treated and untreated rice straw.

High Dimension Granite Pavement Bio-Desalination Practical Implementation

Biocleaning technology is based on the use of safe environmental microorganisms for green cultural heritage (CH) restoration. Compared with traditional cleaning products, this biological technique is very specific, effective, and nontoxic. This innovative biotechnological application has been used for recovering diverse monuments and artworks. Most CH in situ surfaces that are treated with microorganisms are small areas; however, some important pathologies, such as salt contamination, can affect high dimension artistic surfaces. The purpose of this study is to analyze and overcome the problems and limitations of scaling up the bio-desalination protocol for in situ applications. Three water-based gel delivery systems and three heating systems were tested in situ and evaluated in terms of performance difficulty, efficacy, and costs. The tests were carried out on the salt contaminated granite pavement of Cristo Chapel of Sta Ma de Conxo in Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Ground agar 2% and a heating electric mat were selected as the best performing systems. The implemented protocol was applied for the bio-desalination of the 233 m2 Chapel pavement. Conductivity, nitrate–nitrite measurements, biological monitoring, and digital image analysis were performed to determine the efficacy of the treatment. This research allowed for the development of an innovative and optimized in situ, high dimension bio-desalination application protocol transferable to other large scale, in situ biocleaning strategies.

A Review on the Impact of Silver Nanoparticles on Soil Microorganisms and Bioremediation as Heavy Metal Removal Technology

The increasing and varied use of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) as antimicrobial on consumer products increases the risk of the nanomaterial release into the environment and potentially harm beneficial microorganisms in soil. Any change in soil microbial composition will lead to soil quality degradation that eventually reduce crop productivity. The negative effect of AgNPs on soil microorganism has been reported by researchers. There are technologies employed to remove heavy metals from soil such as chemical, physical, and biological technique. However, chemical and physical techniques have some disadvantages e.g high cost and partial removal. Therefore, biological technique including the use of microorganisms (bioremediation) become more favourable. The technique is considered as cost effectiveness and environmentally sustainable method. The present paper summarizes the impact of AgNPs on soil microorganisms and the use of microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, algae, and yeast) to eliminate heavy metals pollution in soil.

Role of optogenetics in pain management

Optogenetics is a biological technique that involves the use of light to control genetically modified neurons to express the channels of light-sensitive Ions. Optogenetics can also be referred to as Optical monitoring of neuronal activity in non-neuronal cells, and control of biochemical pathways. Optogenetics is less invasive than electrical stimulation response time in optogenetics is comparatively faster than other treatments. Chronic pain affects one-third of the population, and current treatments cause limited relief and serious side effects. An alternative approach to pain reduction would be the direct modulation of somatosensory pathways using optogenetics. Optogenetic treatment can be a very effective way to relieve chronic pain while avoiding conventional pain medicine's side effects. The use of optogenetics in pain management has greatly accelerated over the last decade. This review discusses the versatility of different optogenetic tools and its effective applications in the field of medicine.

MF2C3: Multi-Feature Fuzzy Clustering to Enhance Cell Colony Detection in Automated Clonogenic Assay Evaluation

A clonogenic assay is a biological technique for calculating the Surviving Fraction (SF) that quantifies the anti-proliferative effect of treatments on cell cultures: this evaluation is often performed via manual counting of cell colony-forming units. Unfortunately, this procedure is error-prone and strongly affected by operator dependence. Besides, conventional assessment does not deal with the colony size, which is generally correlated with the delivered radiation dose or administered cytotoxic agent. Relying upon the direct proportional relationship between the Area Covered by Colony (ACC) and the colony count and size, along with the growth rate, we propose MF2C3, a novel computational method leveraging spatial Fuzzy C-Means clustering on multiple local features (i.e., entropy and standard deviation extracted from the input color images acquired by a general-purpose flat-bed scanner) for ACC-based SF quantification, by considering only the covering percentage. To evaluate the accuracy of the proposed fully automatic approach, we compared the SFs obtained by MF2C3 against the conventional counting procedure on four different cell lines. The achieved results revealed a high correlation with the ground-truth measurements based on colony counting, by outperforming our previously validated method using local thresholding on L*u*v* color well images. In conclusion, the proposed multi-feature approach, which inherently leverages the concept of symmetry in the pixel local distributions, might be reliably used in biological studies.

Lossless Immunocytochemistry using Photo-polymerized Hydrogel Thin-films

Immunocytochemistry (ICC), or immunofluorescence microscopy, is an essential biological technique for phenotyping cells in both research and diagnostic applications. Standard ICC methods often do not work well when the cell sample contains a small number of cells (<10,000) because of the significant cell loss that occurs during washing, staining, and centrifugation steps. Cell loss is particularly relevant when working with rare cells, such as circulating tumor cells, where such losses could significantly bias experimental outcomes. In order to eliminate cell loss in ICC protocols, we present a method to encapsulate the cell sample in a photo-polymerized hydrogel thin-film. The hydrogel thin-film is permeable to antibodies and other ICC reagents, thereby allowing the use of standard ICC protocols without modification. The cell sample is physically constrained by the hydrogel at the bottom surface of a standard (unmodified) imaging microtiter plate, thereby enabling the acquisition of high-quality micrographs regardless of the properties of the cell sample or staining reagents. Furthermore, while standard ICC requires several centrifugation steps during staining and washing, our hydrogel encapsulation method requires only a single centrifugation step. This property greatly reduces the time required to perform ICC protocols and is more compatible with robotic platforms. In this study, we show that standard ICC and Cytospin protocols are extremely lossy (>70% loss) when the sample contains less than 10,000 cells, while encapsulating the cells using a permeable hydrogel thin-film results in a lossless ICC process.