Physical and chemical modification of distillery sludge for Pb(II) biosorption

The waste distillery sludge from sugar-cane industry was pretreated physically (boiled, heated and autoclaved) as well as chemically (HCl, H(2)SO(4), H(3)PO(4), NaOH, Ca(OH)(2), Al(OH)(3), C(6)H(6), HCHO, CH(3)OH and C1(2)H(25)OSO(3)Na (sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS)) for assessing the comparative sorption capacity of untreated and modified distillery sludge for Pb(II) biosorption from aqueous solutions. Experiments were conducted in shake flasks on a batch basis to access the effect of different experimental parameters such as pH, biosorbent dosage, biosorbent size, initial Pb(II) concentration and contact time. The uptake capacity 'q' (mg/g) of untreated and pretreated distillery sludge was in following order: NaOH (51.29+/-1.21)>HCl (49.82+/-1.22)>HCHO (49.56+/-1.14)>H(2)SO(4) (47.71+/-1.20)>HgCl(2) (45.32+/-1.06)>Ca(OH)(2) (44.01+/-1.18)>MeOH (43.73+/-1.23)>C(6)H(6) (42.72+/-1.19)>H(3)PO(4) (42.01+/-1.17)>SDS (40.87+/-1.27)>autoclaved (40.23+/-1.24)>Boiled (39.95+/-1.19)>heated (38.87+/-1.32)>Al (OH)(3) (38.30+/-1.14)>untreated (37.76+/-1.21). In further parameter studies, the optimized biosorbent size was 0.250 mm at pH 5 and best dose was 0.05 g of biosorbent. The applicability of the Langmuir and Freundlich models for sorption process was tested and best fitted model was Langmuir with the coefficient of determination (R(2)) value, 0.97, the process followed second order kinetic mechanism.     

Cellular DNA breakage by soy isoflavone genistein and its methylated structural analogue biochanin A

Epidemiological studies have indicated that populations with high isoflavone intake through soy consumption have lower rates of breast, prostate, and colon cancer. The isoflavone polyphenol genistein in soybean is considered to be a potent chemopreventive agent against cancer. In order to explore the chemical basis of chemopreventive activity of genistein, in this paper we have examined the structure–activity relationship between genistein and its structural analogue biochanin A. We show that both genistein and its methylated derivative biochanin A are able to mobilize nuclear copper in human lymphocyte, leading to degradation of cellular DNA. However, the relative rate of DNA breakage was greater in the case of genistein. Further, the cellular DNA degradation was inhibited by copper chelator (neocuproine/bathocuproine) but not by compounds that specifically bind iron and zinc (desferrioxamine mesylate and histidine, respectively). We also compared the antioxidant activity of the two isoflavones against tert‐butylhydroperoxide‐induced oxidative breakage in lymphocytes. Again genistein was found to be more effective than biochanin A in providing protection against oxidative stress induced by tert‐butylhydroperoxide. It would therefore appear that the structural features of isoflavones that are important for antioxidant properties are also the ones that contribute to their pro‐oxidant action through a mechanism that involves redox cycling of chromatin‐bound nuclear copper.     

Sargassum swartzii extracts ameliorate memory functions by neurochemical modulation in a rat model

Food Science and Biotechnology - Recently, considerable attention has been paid to drug exploration from natural sources for treating memory loss, a major manifestation of various neurodegenerative...     

Supercritical fluid extraction of bacterial and archaeal lipid biomarkers from anaerobically digested sludge

Supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) was used in the analysis of bacterial respiratory quinone (RQ), bacterial phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA), and archaeal phospholipid ether lipid (PLEL) from anaerobically digested sludge. Bacterial RQ were determined using ultra performance liquid chromatography (UPLC). Determination of bacterial PLFA and archaeal PLEL was simultaneously performed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The effects of pressure, temperature, and modifier concentration on the total amounts of RQ, PLFA, and PLEL were investigated by 23 experiments with five settings chosen for each variable. The optimal extraction conditions that were obtained through a multiple-response optimization included a pressure of 23.6 MPa, temperature of 77.6 °C, and 10.6% (v/v) of methanol as the modifier. Thirty nine components of microbial lipid biomarkers were identified in the anaerobically digested sludge. Overall, the SFE method proved to be more effective, rapid, and quantitative for simultaneously extracting bacterial and archaeal lipid biomarkers, compared to conventional organic solvent extraction. This work shows the potential application of SFE as a routine method for the comprehensive analysis of microbial community structures in environmental assessments using the lipid biomarkers profile.     

Unsteady Friction in Rough Pipes

An energy dissipation model is presented for the computation of unsteady friction losses adapted to smooth-to-rough transition and fully rough pipes. The eddy viscosity model used to compute the Reynolds stresses in turbulent flow is modified to include the effect of roughness, which is considered in the computation of the velocity profiles. The model is tested by comparing the computed transient pressures with measured data from a laboratory test facility and a prototype test. Details of the experimental setup, pressure-head measurements, and valve characteristics during transient flow conditions are presented. The quasi-steady approximation gives an inaccurate prediction of the pressure head history; however, significantly better results are obtained if the unsteady friction effects are included.     

Proteomic Biomarkers of the Apnea Hypopnea Index and Obstructive Sleep Apnea: Insights into the Pathophysiology of Presence,Severity, and Treatment Response

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a disease associated with excessive sleepiness and increased cardiovascular risk, affects an estimated 1 billion people worldwide. The present study examined proteomic biomarkers indicative of presence, severity, and treatment response in OSA. Participants (n = 1391) of the Stanford Technology Analytics and Genomics in Sleep study had blood collected and completed an overnight polysomnography for scoring the apnea–hypopnea index (AHI). A highly multiplexed aptamer-based array (SomaScan) was used to quantify 5000 proteins in all plasma samples. Two separate intervention-based cohorts with sleep apnea (n = 41) provided samples pre- and post-continuous/positive airway pressure (CPAP/PAP). Multivariate analyses identified 84 proteins (47 positively, 37 negatively) associated with AHI after correction for multiple testing. Of the top 15 features from a machine learning classifier for AHI ≥ 15 vs. AHI < 15 (Area Under the Curve (AUC) = 0.74), 8 were significant markers of both AHI and OSA from multivariate analyses. Exploration of pre- and post-intervention analysis identified 5 of the 84 proteins to be significantly decreased following CPAP/PAP treatment, with pathways involving endothelial function, blood coagulation, and inflammatory response. The present study identified PAI-1, tPA, and sE-Selectin as key biomarkers and suggests that endothelial dysfunction and increased coagulopathy are important consequences of OSA, which may explain the association with cardiovascular disease and stroke.     

Contextual Text Mining Framework for Unstructured Textual Judicial Corpora through Ontologies

Digitalization has changed the way of information processing, and new techniques of legal data processing are evolving. Text mining helps to analyze and search different court cases available in the form of digital text documents to extract case reasoning and related data. This sort of case processing helps professionals and researchers to refer the previous case with more accuracy in reduced time. The rapid development of judicial ontologies seems to deliver interesting problem solving to legal knowledge formalization. Mining context information through ontologies from corpora is a challenging and interesting field. This research paper presents a three tier contextual text mining framework through ontologies for judicial corpora. This framework comprises on the judicial corpus, text mining processing resources and ontologies for mining contextual text from corpora to make text and data mining more reliable and fast. A top-down ontology construction approach has been adopted in this paper. The judicial corpus has been selected with a sufficient dataset to process and evaluate the results. The experimental results and evaluations show significant improvements in comparison with the available techniques.     

The second-order cone eigenvalue complementarity problem

The eigenvalue complementarity problem (EiCP) differs from the traditional eigenvalue problem in that the primal and dual variables belong to a closed and convex cone K and its dual, respectively, and satisfy a complementarity condition. In this paper we investigate the solution of the second-order cone EiCP (SOCEiCP) where K is the Lorentz cone. We first show that the SOCEiCP reduces to a special Variational Inequality Problem on a compact set defined by K and a normalization constraint. This guarantees that SOCEiCP has at least one solution, and a new enumerative algorithm is introduced for finding a solution to this problem. The method is based on finding a global minimum of an appropriate nonlinear programming (NLP) formulation of the SOCEiCP using a special branching scheme along with a local nonlinear optimizer that computes stationary points on subsets of the feasible region of NLP associated with the nodes generated by the algorithm. A semi-smooth Newton's method is combined with this enumerative algorithm to enhance its numerical performance. Our computational experience illustrates the efficacy of the proposed techniques in practice.     

Effect of microcrystalline cellulose on characteristics of cassava starch-based bioplastic

ABSTRACT

The vast consumption of conventional plastics has a significant effect on the environment that encourages the utilization of natural resources as the raw materials to substitute the petroleum-based plastics. Poor mechanical and moisture barrier properties of starch-based bioplastics causing the development of modified starch-based bioplastics by incorporating reinforcing material. Microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) as a filler of thermoplastic starch shows strong reinforcing ability and high surface area besides its renewability, biodegradability, and affordability compared to nanocellulose. This study aimed to investigate the effect of MCC on the physical, mechanical, and biodegradability properties of starch-based bioplastic. Bioplastic was prepared by melt-mixing starch and glycerol (3:1, w/w) with MCC (5%, 10%, 15%, and 20%, w/w). Density and water contact angle of bioplastic increased with the increase of MCC concentration. Conversely, the moisture content decreased with the increase of MCC concentration. Mechanical properties evaluation showed that bioplastic with the addition of MCC had higher tensile strength than that without MCC where 20% MCC exhibited the highest tensile strength of 16.7 MPa with elongation of 1.31% and Young’s modulus of 1.5 GPa. In addition, the decomposition temperature of bioplastic with MCC slightly increased which indicated the higher stability. Cross-section micrograph after tensile test showed that the visible inhomogeneous starch granules decreased with the increase of MCC concentration. FTIR spectra exhibited that the intermolecular interaction in bioplastics occurred through C-H, C = O, C-O-C, C-O-H, and O-H groups. In addition, biodegradability tests of bioplastic showed that the growth of microbes increased in the presence of MCC and microbes covered the bioplastic more than 60% in 21 days. The results showed that MCC performed an important role to enhance the physical, mechanical, and biodegradability properties of starch-based bioplastic.