Extensive studies have been conducted in the past decades to predict the environmental abiotic and biotic redox fate of nitroaromatic and nitramine explosives. However, surprisingly little information is available on one-electron standard reduction potentials (Eo(R-NO2/R-NO2-)). The Eo(R-NO2/R-NO2-) is an essential thermodynamic parameter for predicting the rate and extent of reductive transfor...

Introduction and large scale production of synthetic halogenated organic chemicals over the last 50 years has resulted in a group of contaminants which tend to persist in the environment and resist both biotic and abiotic degradation. The low solubility of these types of contaminants, along with their toxicity and tendency to accumulate in food chains, make them particularly relevant targets fo...

Ex-situ reductive dechlorination of carbon tetrachloride (CT) by iron sulfide in a batch reactor was characterized in this study. Reactor scaled-up by 3.5 L was used to investigate the effect of reductant concentration on removal efficiency and process optimization for ex-situ degradation. The experiment was conducted by using both liquid-phase and gas-phase volume at pH 8.5 in anaerobic condit...

Due to environmental persistence and biotoxicity of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), it is urgent to develop potential technologies to remediate PBDEs. Introducing electrodes for microbial electricity generation to stimulate the anaerobic degradation of organic pollutants is highly promising for bioremediation. However, it is still not clear whether the degradation of PBDEs could be prom...

Symbiotic associations of cellulolytic eukaryotic protists and diverse bacteria are common in the gut microbial communities of termites. Besides cellulose degradation by the gut protists, reductive acetogenesis from H2 plus CO2 and nitrogen fixation by gut bacteria play crucial roles in the host termites' nutrition by contributing to the energy demand of termites and supplying nitrogen poor in ...

The reductive transformation of the 10 most-widely distributed fluorinated volatile compounds and of tetrachloroethene was investigated for up to 177 days under anaerobic conditions in sewage sludge and aquifer sediment slurries. Concentrations of parent compounds and of degradation products were identified by GC-MS. We observed transformation of CFC-11 to HCFC-21 and HCFC-31, of CFC-113 to HCF...

Structural investigations on proteins frequently require as a first step the cleavage of the disulfide bonds that link half-cystine residues. Oxidation with performic acid has been used for this purpose first by Sanger (2) and later by Hirs (3), before a detailed investigation of the sequences of the amino acid residues in insulin and ribonuclease, two proteins that are devoid of tryptophan. Sp...

Introduction and large scale production of synthetic halogenated organic chemicals over the last 50 years has resulted in a group of contaminants which tend to persist in the environment and resist both biotic and abiotic degradation. The low solubility of these types of contaminants, along with their toxicity and tendency to accumulate in food chains, make them particularly relevant targets fo...

Caffeic acid O-methyltransferase (COMT) is a bifunctional enzyme that methylates the 5- and 3-hydroxyl positions on the aromatic ring of monolignol precursors, with a preference for 5-hydroxyconiferaldehyde, on the way to producing sinapyl alcohol. Lignins in COMT-deficient plants contain benzodioxane substructures due to the incorporation of 5-hydroxyconiferyl alcohol (5-OH-CA), as a monomer, ...

Platinum-ion-doped TiO2 (Pt(ion)-TiO2) was synthesized by a sol-gel method, and its visible light photocatalytic activities were successfully demonstrated for the oxidative and reductive degradation of chlorinated organic compounds. Pt(ion)-TiO2 exhibited a yellow-brown color, and its band gap was lower than that of undoped TiO2 by about 0.2 eV. The flat band potential of Pt(ion)-TiO2 was posit...