Azo dyes degradation by microorganisms – An efficient and sustainable approach

Synthetic aromatic compounds consisting of various functional groups are known as dyes. These colored compounds are often discharged in effluents, and they are very dangerous to aquatic life. Basically, the dye industry started by using natural plant and insect sources, and then suddenly turned into artificial manufacturing. Natural equilibrium of our environment gets changed by the reduction in photosynthetic activity due to the dyes. In China 900,000 tons of all kinds of dyes are usually produced, which are used in many industries like food, textile, food, paper and leather. Untreated wastewater contaminates aquatic bodies by causing eutrophication, change in water color, oxygen depletion which affect aquatic organisms to a great extent. Dye wastewater is now the key environmental pollution form. In recent eras an extensive study line has been developed to explore the dye decolorization and biodegradation under both aerobic as well as anaerobic conditions. In this review, the chemistry, toxicity and microbial biodegradation/decolorization are presented. Some recent studies along with the new techniques and methodologies of remediating the dye pollution are also discussed to provide the bases of their handling. Overall, efficient and high biodegradation potential make microbes an impending foundation for green chemistry to eradicate toxic dyes from industrial wastewater.     

Natural ecosystem design and control imperatives for sustainable ecosystem services

Sustainability of ecosystem services to humanity will depend on knowledge of how ecosystems work in their natural states, which can then be carried over to managed states. The objective of this paper is to describe four properties of ecosystems taken as natural conditions to be maintained under exploitation. Three of these are design properties: near-steady-state or extremal dynamics, dominance of indirect effects, and positive utility in network organization. One is a regulatory property: distributed multivariable control. The methodology of the paper is mathematical modeling. The design properties are drawn from the inherent formalism in models. The control property is demonstrated by manipulating model parameters to achieve a management goal. The results show that: (1) natural ecosystems operate near, but not at, steady states or extrema, and ecosystems exploited for human purposes should be similarly maintained (near-steady-state imperative); (2) indirect effects are dominant in natural ecosystem networks, and should be taken into account in managing ecosystems for human benefits (nonlocal imperative); (3) natural ecosystems enhance positive relationships among their constituents, and ecosystems maintained for human services should be managed to maximize their expression of mutualistic and synergistic network properties (nonzero imperative); and (4) natural ecosystems are regulated by checks and balances distributed across many control variables in interactive networks, so that obtaining human services from ecosystems should similarly be through coordinated use of many, not few, control variables (multifactorial control imperative). The conclusion from these results is that ecosystems under natural conditions evidence organizational properties evolved over evolutionary time, and management for sustainable extraction of ecosystem services should seek to preserve and emulate these properties in the new exploited states.     

An efficient and versatile approach for the construction of oligonucleotide microarrays

A new immobilization chemistry for covalent attachment of phosphorylated oligonucleotides on epoxy-activated glass surface via opening of oxirane ring is described. The proposed strategy results in excellent immobilization efficiency, spot homogeneity, and morphology. The constructed microarray was successfully demonstrated for discrimination of nucleotide mismatches.     

可持续林业管理指标的探讨

可持续林业管理指标的探讨曹志平（中国农业大学资环学院生态系,北京１０００９４）钟晓东（国家环保局国际合作司,北京１０００９４）目前,林业管理的方向正在发生变化,即由过去单一的木材生产向可持续的森林生态系统管理转化,从而更好地满足人类的需求。国际社会认...     

An autonomic approach for resource provisioning of cloud services

Recently, there has been a significant increase in the use of cloud-based services that are offered in software as a service (SaaS) models by SaaS providers, and irregular access of different users to these cloud services leads to fluctuations in the demand workload. It is difficult to determine the suitable amount of resources required to run cloud services in response to the varying workloads, and this may lead to undesirable states of over-provisioning and under-provisioning. In this paper, we address improvements to resource provisioning for cloud services by proposing an autonomic resource provisioning approach that is based on the concept of the control monitor-analyze-plan-execute (MAPE) loop, and we design a resource provisioning framework for cloud environments. The experimental results show that the proposed approach reduces the total cost by up to 35 %, the number of service level agreement (SLA) violations by up to 40 %, and increases the resource utilization by up to 25 % compared with the other approaches.     

Reviewing the dynamics of economic values and preferences for ecosystem goods and services

The present paper addresses the issue of a dynamic approach to biodiversity conservation by focusing on published evidence on the dynamics of economic values and preferences for ecosystem goods and services. Empirical evidence referring to the dynamics of ecosystem values was identified as both demand-driven and supply-driven value dynamics. A survey of temporal reliability tests revealed considerable differences in the time span examined (2 weeks to 20 years). The evidence shows that ecosystem value estimates, as expressed through mean Willingness To Pay remain significantly stable in the time span of 2 weeks to 5 years, but this is not the case for time periods of 20 years. For longer periods, both a weak and strong version of preference evolution were examined; here the elements of cultural transmission and evolutionary approaches make the task of modelling the dynamics of preferences rather complex. Integrated models and dynamic bioeconomic models were examined as representative approaches to supply-driven dynamics. These approaches share a role in pushing our understanding of complex systems and alerting both researchers and policy makers to the dangers of oversimplification. The reviewed models are nevertheless normative in nature in the sense that they describe how the complex socio-ecological systems should evolve over time in order to fulfil the requirements of efficiency and sustainability. Mixing of methods and pooling of data seems the only way forward. In this respect, the potential of systematic and formalised interdisciplinary research lies in the integration of insights, methods and data drawn from natural and social sciences.     

生态系统服务功能与可持续发展

本文阐述了生态系统服务功能,生态系统不仅为人类提供了食品、医药及其它生产生活原料,更重要的是维持了人类赖以生存的生命支持系统,维持物质的生物地化循环与水文循环,维持生物多样性,净化环境,维持大气化学的平衡与稳定;分析探讨了生态系统服务功能及其与可持续发展研究的关系,可持续发展要以保护生态环境为基础,与资源和环境的承载能力相协调,而人类活动对森林、湿地和其他生态系统的破坏,已严重危害了生态系统的服务功能,保护生态系统服务功能已刻不容缓;从而提出了保护生态服务功能的对策。     

An efficient rank based approach for closest string and closest substring

This paper aims to present a new genetic approach that uses rank distance for solving two known NP-hard problems, and to compare rank distance with other distance measures for strings. The two NP-hard problems we are trying to solve are closest string and closest substring. For each problem we build a genetic algorithm and we describe the genetic operations involved. Both genetic algorithms use a fitness function based on rank distance. We compare our algorithms with other genetic algorithms that use different distance measures, such as Hamming distance or Levenshtein distance, on real DNA sequences. Our experiments show that the genetic algorithms based on rank distance have the best results.     

生态系统服务功能分类与价值评估探讨

生态系统服务功能及其价值评估研究是当前生态学研究的热点,对于促进生态系统可持续管理具有重要作用。目前,在生态系统服务功能分类及价值评估方面,还没有形成比较系统的理论;在服务价值的评估方面,国内相关研究多数套用现有的一般化计算公式对生态服务功能进行计算,缺少针对性和探索性。总结近年来笔者在这方面的研究得失,并综合前人的研究,将生态系统服务功能进行新的分类,提出“核心”服务功能、“理论”服务价值与“现实”服务价值的概念,并以温州三湿地生态系统服务功能及其价值评估研究作为实例,论证所提出的新概念。生态系统服务功能及价值评估研究的最终目的是为生态系统管理决策者提供信息,因此服务价值评估的意义不在于对每一项服务功能价值的精确估算,甚至不需要计算一个生态系统所有的服务功能价值,而应抓住一个或几个有计算依据的核心服务功能。提出理论服务价值概念的主要目的在于同现实服务价值的比较,量化某服务功能的退化程度,明确后续生态恢复和重建的主要目标,并可在一定程度上作为生态恢复的重要指标。     

An engineering approach to modelling, decision support and control for sustainable systems

Engineering research and development contributes to the advance of sustainable agriculture both through innovative methods to manage and control processes, and through quantitative understanding of the operation of practical agricultural systems using decision models. This paper describes how an engineering approach, drawing on mathematical models of systems and processes, contributes new methods that support decision making at all levels from strategy and planning to tactics and real-time control. The ability to describe the system or process by a simple and robust mathematical model is critical, and the outputs range from guidance to policy makers on strategic decisions relating to land use, through intelligent decision support to farmers and on to real-time engineering control of specific processes. Precision in decision making leads to decreased use of inputs, less environmental emissions and enhanced profitability-all essential to sustainable systems.     

Tailoring lignin biosynthesis for efficient and sustainable biofuel production

Increased global interest in a bio‐based economy has reinvigorated the research on the cell wall structure and composition in plants. In particular, the study of plant lignification has become a central focus, with respect to its intractability and negative impact on the utilization of the cell wall biomass for producing biofuels and bio‐based chemicals. Striking progress has been achieved in the last few years both on our fundamental understanding of lignin biosynthesis, deposition and assembly, and on the interplay of lignin synthesis with the plant growth and development. With the knowledge gleaned from basic studies, researchers are now able to invent and develop elegant biotechnological strategies to sophisticatedly manipulate the quantity and structure of lignin and thus to create economically viable bioenergy feedstocks. These concerted efforts open an avenue for the commercial production of cost‐competitive biofuel to meet our energy needs.     

An efficient two-stage approach for image-based FSI analysis of atherosclerotic arteries

Patient-specific biomechanical modeling of atherosclerotic arteries has the potential to aid clinicians in characterizing lesions and determining optimal treatment plans. To attain high levels of accuracy, recent models use medical imaging data to determine plaque component boundaries in three dimensions, and fluid–structure interaction is used to capture mechanical loading of the diseased vessel. As the plaque components and vessel wall are often highly complex in shape, constructing a suitable structured computational mesh is very challenging and can require a great deal of time. Models based on unstructured computational meshes require relatively less time to construct and are capable of accurately representing plaque components in three dimensions. These models unfortunately require additional computational resources and computing time for accurate and meaningful results. A two-stage modeling strategy based on unstructured computational meshes is proposed to achieve a reasonable balance between meshing difficulty and computational resource and time demand. In this method, a coarsegrained simulation of the full arterial domain is used to guide and constrain a fine-scale simulation of a smaller region of interest within the full domain. Results for a patient-specific carotid bifurcation model demonstrate that the two-stage approach can afford a large savings in both time for mesh generation and time and resources needed for computation. The effects of solid and fluid domain truncation were explored, and were shown to minimally affect accuracy of the stress fields predicted with the two-stage approach.     

An efficient support vector machine approach for identifying protein S-nitrosylation sites

Protein S-nitrosylation plays a key and specific role in many cellular processes. Detecting possible S-nitrosylated substrates and their corresponding exact sites is crucial for studying the mechanisms of these biological processes. Comparing with the expensive and time-consuming biochemical experiments, the computational methods are attracting considerable attention due to their convenience and fast speed. Although some computational models have been developed to predict S-nitrosylation sites, their accuracy is still low. In this work,we incorporate support vector machine to predict protein S-nitrosylation sites. After a careful evaluation of six encoding schemes, we propose a new efficient predictor, CPR-SNO, using the coupling patterns based encoding scheme. The performance of our CPR-SNO is measured with the area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.8289 in 10-fold cross validation experiments, which is significantly better than the existing best method GPS-SNO 1.0's 0.685 performance. In further annotating large-scale potential S-nitrosylated substrates, CPR-SNO also presents an encouraging predictive performance. These results indicate that CPR-SNO can be used as a competitive protein S-nitrosylation sites predictor to the biological community. Our CPR-SNO has been implemented as a web server and is available at http://math.cau.edu.cn/CPR -SNO/CPR-SNO.html.     

An efficient multiple-cell approach to automatic aneuploidy screening

We describe a statistical method of discriminating efficiently, on the basis of multiple-cell measurements without operator interaction, between chromosomally normal human cell lines and those either containing a single additional chromosome or missing one chromosome. We begin by defining hypothetical but realistic "confusion matrices," which give the probabilities of (1) assigning each chromosome to each of various possible groups and (2) rejecting it as unclassifiable. From these, false-positive and false-negative rates of 0.01 and 0.001, respectively, are found to be attainable by processing 16 to 32 cells if the average probability of misclassifying or rejecting individual chromosomes is 5% to 9% for "Denver" groups or 10% to 17% for homologous pairs. Since these values are probably within the reach of current technology, the method is a basis for a realistic, fully automatic screening system. We also show how the method can be extended to the detection of quite general types of chromosomally abnormal cell lines.     

An efficient oxidizing reagent for the synthesis of mixed backbone oligonucleotides via the H-phosphonate approach

The mixture of carbon tetrachloride, N-methyl morpholine (NMM), pyridine and water in acetonitrile has been exploited for the oxidation of dinucleoside H-phosphonate diesters to the corresponding phosphates. The system is found to be inert to the phosphoramidate (P-N) and the phosphorothioate (P-S) linkages and has successfully been applied to the solid phase synthesis of mixed-backbone oligonucleotides (MBOs).