诺维信

ABSTRACT This study quantified the removal and biotransformation of the industrial enzymes subtilisin and α-amylase in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and activated sludge systems. Measurements of subtilisin and α-amylase at an industrial WWTP showed high inlet concentrations and concentrations below quantification limits in the outlet, corresponding to removals of more than 99% of intact enzymes. Lower concentrations of the enzymes were found in the inlet to a municipal WWTP, where the concentrations in the outlet were below the quantification limits. Complementary laboratory simulation experiments with activated sludge demonstrated extremely rapid biotransformation of subtilisin and α-amylase under aerobic conditions. More than 70% of the intact enzyme protein was lost within 0.25 min, and more than 90% within 5 min, followed by slower continuous transformation to levels below quantification limits within 48 h. The transformation followed first-order kinetics with disappearance time 50 (DT50) values of less than 10 seconds for both enzymes. In contrast, only minor losses were observed in abiotic sludge, indicating that microbial degradation is the primary removal mechanism. Overall, the results show that subtilisin and α-amylase are rapidly transformed during wastewater treatment, supporting the assumption of very low environmental concentrations and providing robust data for environmental exposure modelling.

Sugarcane is a major cash crop in several major states and agro-climatic zones in India. The area under cultivation has remained comparatively static over the past 10 years but the yields have been increasing steadily due to various interventions including improvement in crop breeding, agronomic practices and better plant protection tools. This has contributed to a significant increase in overall sugarcane on-farm productivity. However, there is still a major gap between the actual yield and productivity potential as well as actual sugar recovery versus the potential. CaneGro bridges this gap, both from an on-farm cane yield increase and in-mills sugar recovery increase perspective. Current review elaborates on applications of CaneGro as both for crop productivity and sugar recovery enhancer.

The genome sequence contains the blueprint for governing cellular processes. While the availability of genomes has vastly increased over the last decades, experimental annotation of the various functional, non-coding and regulatory elements encoded in the DNA sequence remains both expensive and challenging. This has sparked interest in unsupervised language modeling of genomic DNA, a paradigm that has seen great success for protein sequence data. Although various DNA language models have been proposed, evaluation tasks often differ between individual works, and might not fully recapitulate the fundamental challenges of genome annotation, including the length, scale and sparsity of the data. In this study, we introduce BEND, a Benchmark for DNA language models, featuring a collection of realistic and biologically meaningful downstream tasks defined on the human genome. We find that embeddings from current DNA LMs can approach performance of expert methods on some tasks, but only capture limited information about long-range features. BEND is available at https://github.com/frederikkemarin/BEND.

Enzymatic degradation of cellulosic biomass is a well-established route for the sustainable production of biofuels, chemicals, and materials. A strategy employed by nature and industry to achieve an efficient degradation of cellulose is that cellobiohydrolases (or exocellulases), such as Cel7A, work synergistically with endoglucanases, such as Cel7B, to achieve the complete degradation of cellulose. However, a complete mechanistic understanding of this exo-endo synergy is still lacking. Here, we used single-molecule fluorescence microscopy to quantify the binding kinetics of Cel7A on cellulose when it is acting alone on the cellulose fibrils and in the presence of its synergy partner, the endoglucanase Cel7B. To this end, we used a fluorescently tagged Cel7A and studied its binding in the presence of the unlabeled Cel7B. This provided the single-molecule data necessary for the estimation of the rate constants of association k(ON )and dissociation k(OFF) of Cel7A for the substrate. We show that the presence of Cel7B does not impact the dissociation rate constant, k(OFF). But, the association rate of Cel7A decreases by a factor of 2 when Cel7B is present at a molar proportion of 10:1. This ratio has previously been shown to lead to synergy. This decrease in association rate is observed in a wide range of total enzyme concentrations, from sub nM to mu M concentrations. This decrease in k ON is consistent with the formation of cellulase clusters recently observed by others using atomic force microscopy.

The Particle Shear and Impact tester has been developed to assess particle attrition in response to typical mechanical stresses prevailing in manufacturing plants. The particles are subjected to shear stresses by two counter-rotating rollers with an adjustable gap, and to repeated impacts through collisions at bends as they are recirculated in the tester. In this study, evaluation of the device performance and settings is described for attrition of enzyme granules. The extent of attrition of three different granule samples, subjected to impact alone, shear alone and coupled shear and impact tests is assessed and the sources of variability of the tester are investigated to determine its experimental repeatability. The mass collected in various parts of the tester is assessed both gravimetrically and by enzyme assay in order to investigate the device performance. Due to high sensitivity in enzyme dust analysis, adhesion of enzyme dust to surfaces influences the attrition variability. Three cleaning approaches are examined for removing enzyme dust deposited in the tester. (c) 2024 The Society of Powder Technology Japan. Published by Elsevier B.V. and The Society of Powder Technology Japan. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/).