Sedimentary Residual Soil as a Waste Containment Barrier Material

Compacted soil liners are widely used as a waste containment barrier to control or restrict the migration of contaminant/leachate from the landfill into the environment because of their low hydraulic conductivity, attenuation capacity, resistance to damage or puncture, and cost effectiveness. Compacted soil liners are usually composed of natural inorganic clays or clayey soils. If natural clayey soils are not available, kaolinite or commercially available high swelling clay (bentonite) can be mixed with local soils or sand. This study examines the potential of a sedimentary residual soil as a waste containment barrier in landfills. The laboratory experiments conducted were: grain size distribution, Atterberg limits, swelling tests, compaction, volumetric shrinkage strain, unconfined compression, hydraulic conductivity and cation exchange capacity. The experimental results were compared with those recommended by various researchers for evaluation of its suitability. Test results showed that the soil compacted with modified Proctor compaction effort possesses low hydraulic conductivity (≤1 × 10^?7 cm/s) and adequate strength. In addition, compacted sedimentary residual soil exhibited little volumetric shrinkage strain of below 4% at this compaction effort. Thus, the sedimentary residual soil could be effectively used for the construction of a waste containment barrier in landfills.     

Nuclear Genome Sequence Survey of the Dinoflagellate Heterocapsa triquetra

ABSTRACT. Dinoflagellates have among the largest nuclear genomes known, but we know little about their contents or organisation. Given the interest in dinoflagellate ecology, cell biology, and evolutionary biology, there are many reasons to thoroughly investigate the contents of dinoflagellate genomes, but because of their large size the only thorough samples to date have relied on expressed sequence tag surveys to analyse cDNAs. To complement this, there are some studies of the physical properties of dinoflagellate chromosomes, but no direct survey of the nature of the sequences contained within them. To start to build a picture of the contents of these genomes, we have sequenced over 230,000 bp from the nuclear genome of Heterocapsa triquetra, which has been estimated to be 18–23 billion base pairs in total. The survey includes one putative gene with two relict spliced leaders, one putative pseudogene, and a small number of low‐complexity repeats, transposons, and other putative selfish elements, all of which account for about 5% of the survey. Another 5% of the survey was long, complex repeats, some highly represented. By far the greatest fraction of the survey (89.5%) is made up of non‐repeated sequence with no similarity to any other known sequence.     

Replication of M13 single—stranded DNA bearing a sitespecific ethenocytosine lesion by Escherichia coil cell extracts

Previous investigation on the mutagenic effects of 3,N^4-Ethenocytosine (εC),a nonpairing DNA lesion,revealed the existence of a novel SOS-independent inducible mutagenic mechanism in E.coli termed UVM for UV modulation of mutagenesis.To investigate whether UVM is mediated by an alteration of DNA replication,we have set up an in vitro replication system in which phage M13 viral single-stranded DNA bearing a single site-specific (εC) residue is replicated by soluble protein extracts from E.coli cells.Replication products were analyzed by agarose gel electrophoresis and the frequency of translesion synthesis was determined by restriction endonuclease analyses.Our data indicate that DNA replication is strongly inhibited by εC,but that translesion DNA synthesis does occur in about 14% of the replicated DNA molecules.These results are very similar to those observed previously in vivo,and suggest that this experimental system may be suitable for evaluating alterations in DNA replication in UVM-induced cells.