Search results for "Lability"
showing 10 items of 802 documents
Effect of macro and micro nutrients addition during anaerobic mono-digestion of grass silage in leach-bed reactors
2019
The effect of macro- (NH4Cl) (set I) and micro-nutrients (Fe, Ni, Co and Mo) (set II) addition on chemical oxygen demand (COD) solubilisation during anaerobic mono-digestion of grass silage was investigated in two sets of leach bed reactor experiments at 35°C. Results showed that addition of NH4Cl and micro-nutrients improved COD solubilisation by 18% (0.56 g SCOD g−1 volatile solids) and 7% (0.45 g SCOD g−1 VS), respectively than control. About 20–50% of the added micro-nutrients were bioavailable in the produced leachates, while the rest (50–80%) were adsorbed onto the grass silage. Results of biological methane potential assays showed that, specific methane yields of grass silage were im…
On the different growth conditions affecting silver antimicrobial efficacy on Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella enterica.
2012
Abstract Silver is known to inhibit microorganisms and therefore it is an ideal candidate for its incorporation in a wide variety of materials for food applications. However, there is still a need for understanding how silver prolonged exposure to bacterial contamination affects the bioavailability of the active silver species. In the present study, growth curves of Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella enterica were performed for 3–5 days in Tryptic Soy Broth (TSB) and M9 minimal medium (M9) in the presence of silver ions and silver solutions previously in contact with the growth media. The cultivability of the bacteria under these conditions was correlated with the viability of the bacter…
Monitoring wireless sensor networks through logical deductive processes
2006
This paper proposes a distributed multi-agent architecture for wireless sensor networks management, which exploits the dynamic reasoning capabilities of the Situation Calculus in order to emulate the reactive behavior of a human expert to fault situations. The information related to network events is generated by tunable agents installed on the network nodes and is collected by a logical entity for network managing where it is merged with general domain knowledge, with the aim of identifying the root causes of faults, and deciding on reparative actions. The logical inference system has being devised to carry out automated isolation, diagnosis, and, whenever possible, repair of network anoma…
SWAPHI: Smith-Waterman Protein Database Search on Xeon Phi Coprocessors
2014
The maximal sensitivity of the Smith-Waterman (SW) algorithm has enabled its wide use in biological sequence database search. Unfortunately, the high sensitivity comes at the expense of quadratic time complexity, which makes the algorithm computationally demanding for big databases. In this paper, we present SWAPHI, the first parallelized algorithm employing Xeon Phi coprocessors to accelerate SW protein database search. SWAPHI is designed based on the scale-and-vectorize approach, i.e. it boosts alignment speed by effectively utilizing both the coarse-grained parallelism from the many co-processing cores (scale) and the fine-grained parallelism from the 512-bit wide single instruction, mul…
A privacy-aware framework for decentralized online social networks
2015
Online social networks based on a single service provider suffer several drawbacks, first of all the privacy issues arising from the delegation of user data to a single entity. Distributed online social networks (DOSN) have been recently proposed as an alternative solution allowing users to keep control of their private data. However, the lack of a centralized entity introduces new problems, like the need of defining proper privacy policies for data access and of guaranteeing the availability of user's data when the user disconnects from the social network. This paper introduces a privacy-aware support for DOSN enabling users to define a set of privacy policies which describe who is entitle…
Soil Nitrogen Form and Availability affect the role of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi on Nitrogen Uptake and Nitrogen Recovery in Durum Wheat
2018
The term Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (AM) is referred to the symbiosis between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and plant roots. Such symbiosis is the most widespread among plants (two out of three of the all plant taxa) including the majority of crops. AMF belong to the monophyletic subphylum Glomeromycotina which include obligate biotrophs that entirely relay on the host plant for the carbon source. In exchange, AMF provide their host several benefits which have been recognise in mitigation of biotic and abiotic stress, even though the main benefit ascribe to AMF is improving P uptake. However, although the AM symbiosis is considered as a classic example of a mutualistic symbiosis, many fact…
Conventional tillage versus no-tillage: Nitrogen use efficiency component analysis of contrasting durum wheat genotypes grown in a Mediterranean envi…
2023
Very little information is available for Mediterranean areas about the soil N dynamics and crop N use efficiency during the transition phase from conventional tillage (CT) to no-tillage (NT). Hence, a 2-yr experiment was conducted under semiarid Mediterranean conditions in three sites to study how soil N dynamics, crop N uptake, grain yield, and N use efficiency vary with N-fertilization rate and crop genotype in the switch year from CT to NT. Treatments consisted of two tillage systems (CT and NT), five N-fertilization rates (0, 40, 80, 120, and 160 kg N ha−1), and two durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) genotypes (one modern variety and one old landrace). Irrespective of the genotype, NT r…
BIOCHARS IN SOILS: TOWARDS THE REQUIRED LEVEL OF SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING
2017
The special issue on Biochar as an Option for Sustainable Resource Management Key priorities in biochar research for future guidance of sustainable policy development have been identified by expert assessment within the COST Action TD1107. The current level of scientific understanding (LOSU) regarding the consequences of biochar application to soil were explored. Five broad thematic areas of biochar research were addressed: soil biodiversity and ecotoxicology, soil organic matter and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, soil physical properties, nutrient cycles and crop production, and soil remediation. The highest future research priorities regarding biochar’s effects in soils were: functional …
Transdermal and Skin-Targeted Drug Delivery
1997
Background: The application of therapeutic agents to the skin addresses three general objectives: (a) the treatment of a variety of dermatologic diseases; (b) the “targeted” delivery of drugs to deeper subcutaneous tissues, with a concomitant reduction in systemic exposure; and (c) socalled transdermal administration to elicit a systemic pharmacologic effect. Objective: Recently, significant progress towards all three goals has been recorded and the level of research and development activity remains high. We aim to discuss these advances from mechanistic and clinical standpoints. Results: For the topical treatment of skin disease, novel vehicles (e.g., stabilized, supersaturated systems and…
Mapping of BLASTP Algorithm onto GPU Clusters
2011
Searching protein sequence database is a fundamental and often repeated task in computational biology and bioinformatics. However, the high computational cost and long runtime of many database scanning algorithms on sequential architectures heavily restrict their applications for large-scale protein databases, such as GenBank. The continuing exponential growth of sequence databases and the high rate of newly generated queries further deteriorate the situation and establish a strong requirement for time-efficient scalable database searching algorithms. In this paper, we demonstrate how GPU clusters, powered by the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), OpenMP, and MPI parallel programmi…