Assessing the Risk of Soil Pollution around an Industrialized Mining Region Using a Geostatistical Approach

Knowledge of mobility of some heavy metals in coal mining areas is fundamental in order to understand their toxicity and geochemical behavior. This paper aims to map pollution and assess the risk to agricultural soils in a wider lignite opencast mining and industrial area. Geochemical data related to environmental studies show that the waste characteristics favor solubilization and mobilization of inorganic contaminants. The geochemical distribution of soil pollution is studied by the application of the Bayesian Maximum Entropy (BME) procedure, a versatile extension of geostatistics which allows merging spatial and temporal estimations in a single model. Results reveal a correlation range of contaminants concentrations up to 5000 m and indicate a potential forecasting range of up to five years. Inspection of the produced spatiotemporal maps indicates that the whole study area is contaminated by As and various heavy metals, a situation which seems to be more or less stable over time.     

Anticancer Metal Complexes: Synthesis and Cytotoxicity Evaluation by the MTT Assay

Titanium (IV) and vanadium (V) complexes are highly potent anticancer agents. A challenge in their synthesis refers to their hydrolytic instability; therefore their preparation should be conducted under an inert atmosphere. Evaluation of the anticancer activity of these complexes can be achieved by the MTT assay.The MTT assay is a colorimetric viability assay based on enzymatic reduction of the MTT molecule to formazan when it is exposed to viable cells. The outcome of the reduction is a color change of the MTT molecule. Absorbance measurements relative to a control determine the percentage of remaining viable cancer cells following their treatment with varying concentrations of a tested compound, which is translated to the compound anticancer activity and its IC₅₀ values. The MTT assay is widely common in cytotoxicity studies due to its accuracy, rapidity, and relative simplicity.Herein we present a detailed protocol for the synthesis of air sensitive metal based drugs and cell viability measurements, including preparation of the cell plates, incubation of the compounds with the cells, viability measurements using the MTT assay, and determination of IC₅₀ values.     

Factors affecting the health of residents in China: A perspective based on the living environment

Residents’ health is an important factor affecting social development and harmony. Based on 2010 China Family Panel Studies data of the Institute of Social Science Survey, Peking University and using a multi-classification logit regression model, we analyze the factors that affect the health status of residents in China. These factors include environmental pollution, which is a particularly important factor. Our study found that the impacts of residents’ characteristic variables, external living environment, and living habits vary. As residents age, their health status deteriorates. For the General, Less healthy, and Unhealthy groups, an income of less than CNY 10,000 significantly affects health status; however, when their income is greater than CNY 10,000, it no longer has a significant effect. For the Very unhealthy group, this particular threshold value is CNY 3000. At least one of urban–rural classification and residence registration status is significant, indicating that the urban–rural dual structure as well as the household registration system significantly affects residents’ health status. However, the direction of this effect is uncertain. Cooking water significantly affects the Less healthy and Unhealthy groups, and tap water is more conducive to health. Polluting enterprises within a radius of five kilometers mainly affect the Unhealthy group, but the direction of its impact is contrary to expectations. Smoking and drinking significantly affect the health status of the General, Less healthy, and Unhealthy groups. However, the direction of their impact was contrary to expectations. For the Very unhealthy group, drinking has a significant impact on residents’ health status, but the direction of the impact was again the opposite of what we expected. Smoking has no significant impact on the health status of this group. Exercise significantly affects the Less healthy and Unhealthy groups, but its influence has no obvious trend. Our study shows that living habits have a smaller influence on residents’ health status.     

Purification of carbonic anhydrase-II from sheep liver and inhibitory effects of some heavy metals on enzyme activity

In this study; sheep carbonic anhydrase-II (SCA-II) (E.C: 4.2.1.1) was purified from sheep liver and in vitro effects of heavy metals on the enzyme was examined. SCA-II isozyme was purified with about 203 purification fold, a specific activity of 2320 EU/mg-protein and a yield of 72 by using Sepharose-4B-L tyrosine-sulfanilamide affinity gel chromatography. Purity of the SCA-II enzyme was verified by SDS-PAGE technique and subunit molecular mass of the enzyme was found as 29?kDa. In addition to this, inhibitory effects of some metal ions on the enzyme were examined. In this study, sheep liver tissue was chosen; because the liver is an organ in which metal wastes of air, water and food are collected and it is easy to obtain the liver tissue. Because of the very important duties of CA enzyme on living beings, the effect of metals on the CA enzyme was investigated.     

Air pollution and gene-specific methylation in the Normative Aging Study

The mechanisms by which air pollution has multiple systemic effects in humans are not fully elucidated, but appear to include inflammation and thrombosis. This study examines whether concentrations of ozone and components of fine particle mass are associated with changes in methylation on tissue factor (F3), interferon gamma (IFN-γ), interleukin 6 (IL-6), toll-like receptor 2 (TLR-2), and intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1). We investigated associations between air pollution exposure and gene-specific methylation in 777 elderly men participating in the Normative Aging Study (1999–2009). We repeatedly measured methylation at multiple CpG sites within each gene’s promoter region and calculated the mean of the position-specific measurements. We examined intermediate-term associations between primary and secondary air pollutants and mean methylation and methylation at each position with distributed-lag models. Increase in air pollutants concentrations was significantly associated with F3, ICAM-1, and TLR-2 hypomethylation, and IFN-γ and IL-6 hypermethylation. An interquartile range increase in black carbon concentration averaged over the four weeks prior to assessment was associated with a 12% reduction in F3 methylation (95% CI: -17% to -6%). For some genes, the change in methylation was observed only at specific locations within the promoter region. DNA methylation may reflect biological impact of air pollution. We found some significant mediated effects of black carbon on fibrinogen through a decrease in F3 methylation, and of sulfate and ozone on ICAM-1 protein through a decrease in ICAM-1 methylation.     

Inhibitory effect of heavy water on mutability of chemically injured Escherichia coli cells

After E. coli cells (WP2 and WP2uvrA) were treated with chemical mutagens (methyl methanesulfonate, MMS; N-methyl-N-nitrosourea, MNU; 4-nitroquinoline 1-oxide, 4NQO) in 1/15 M phosphate buffer, the mutability of the treated cells plated on a D₂O-agar plate was compared with that plated on an ordinary H₂O-agar plate. The mutation frequency decreased more or less on the D₂O-agar plate. The D₂O-substitution effects, as termed by the relative mutation frequencies (MF_D2O/MF_H2O), are 0.92 for MMS, 0.29 for MNU, and 0.42 for 4NQO in WP2, and 0.68 for MMS, 0.49 for MNU, and 0.16 for 4NQO in WP2uvrA. The D₂O effect seemed to be partly related to the function of the uvrA gene-associated products. The pH dependence of mutability was discussed in connection with the D₂O-substitution effect.     

Evaluation of zinc content in children’s hair

The zinc content in the hair of 654 children living in various rural and industrial areas in southern Poland was assayed by means of the atomic absorption spectrometry, following the dry digestion procedure. The hair of girls exhibited statistically significant higher level of Zn than the boys’ hair, although in the site of extremal Zn contamination, the inverse relation was found.     

Impact of sewage pollution on two species of sea urchins in the Mediterranean Sea (Cortiou,France): Radial asymmetry as a bioindicator of stress

BackgroundThe surroundings of the Cortiou sewage are among the most polluted environments of the French Mediterranean Sea (Marseilles, France). So far, no studies have precisely quantified the impact of pollution on the development of organisms in this area.MethodsWe used a fluctuating asymmetry (FA) measure of developmental instability (DI) to assess environmental stress in two species of radially symmetric sea urchins (Arbacia lixula and Paracentrotus lividus). For six sampling sites (Cortiou, Riou, Maire, East Maire, Mejean, and Niolon), levels of FA were calculated from continuous and discrete skeletal measures of ambulacral length, number of pore pairs and primary tubercles.ResultsFor both species, the most polluted sampling site, Cortiou, displayed the highest level of FA, while the Maire and East Maire sampling sites displayed the lowest levels. A. lixula revealed systematic differences in FA among sampling sites for all characters and P. lividus showed differences in FA for the number of primary tubercles.ConclusionsStatistical analyses of FA show a concordance between the spatial patterns of FA among sampling sites and the spatial distribution of sewage discharge pollutants in the Cortiou area. High developmental stress in these sampling sites is associated with exposure to high concentrations of heavy metals and many harmful organic substances contained in wastewater. FA estimated from structures with complex symmetry appears to be a fast and reliable tool to detect subtle differences in FA. Its use in biomonitoring programs for inferring anthropogenic and natural environmental stress is suggested.