Populations of small pelagic fish are strongly influenced by climate. The inability of managers to anticipate environment-driven fluctuations in stock productivity or distribution can lead to overfishing and stock collapses, inflexible management regulations inducing shifts in the functional response to human predators, lost opportunities to harvest populations, bankruptcies in the fishing indu...

Phenol is an important commodity for the chemical industry, used for many processes and deemed to be a major pollutant due to its xenobiotic nature and high toxicity. For the purpose of phenol bioremediation a biotechnological set up consisting of a continuous packed column bioreactor with Candida tropicalis adhered onto activated carbon beads has been previously described. In this work, we sho...

Microalgae are capable of producing up to 70% w/w triglycerides with respect to their dry cell weight. Since microalgae utilize the greenhouse gas CO2, they can be cultivated on marginal lands and grow up to ten times faster than terrestrial plants, the generation of algae oils is a promising option for the development of sustainable bioprocesses, that are of interest for the chemical lubricant...

BACKGROUND REDD+ programs rely on accurate forest carbon monitoring. Several REDD+ projects have recently shown that local communities can monitor above ground biomass as well as external professionals, but at lower costs. However, the precision and accuracy of carbon monitoring conducted by local communities have rarely been assessed in the tropics. The aim of this study was to investigate dif...

Lignin is considered as nature's most abundant aromatic polymer co-generated during papermaking and biomass fractionation. There are different types of lignins depending on the source (hardwood, softwood, annual crops, etc.) and recovery process. Recently, an emerging class of lignin products, namely sulphur-free lignins, from biomass conversion processes, solvent pulping and soda pulping, have...

Introduction: The Powdered Activated Carbon Treatment (PACT) has been proposed as an alternative in wastewater treatment and wastewater biomass protection against toxic substances. This study aims to evaluate PACT performance in treating dyes, acid orange, and remazol brilliant reactive blue. Materials and Methods: This empirical- applied research was carried out in pilot scale in which differ...

Ethanol is the most widely used renewable transportation biofuel in the United States, with the production of 13.3 billion gallons in 2012 [John UM (2013) Contribution of the Ethanol Industry to the Economy of the United States]. Despite considerable effort to produce fuels from lignocellulosic biomass, chemical pretreatment and the addition of saccharolytic enzymes before microbial bioconversi...

BACKGROUND Despite decades of work and billions of dollars of investments in laboratory and pilot plant projects, commercial production of cellulosic ethanol is only now beginning to emerge. Because of: (1)high technical risk coupled with; (2) high capital investment cost relative to ethanol product value, investors have not been able to justify moving forward with large scale projects on woody...

Expansins refer to a family of closely related non-enzymatic proteins found in the plant cell wall that are involved in the cell wall loosening. In addition, expansins appear to be involved in different physiological and environmental responses in plants such as leaf and stem initiation and growth, stomata opening and closing, reproduction, ripening and stress tolerance. Sugarcane (Saccharum sp...

BACKGROUND Many fungi boost the deconstruction of lignocellulosic plant biomass via oxidation using lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases (LPMOs). The application of LPMOs is expected to contribute to ecologically friendly conversion of biomass into fuels and chemicals. Moreover, applications of LPMO-modified cellulose-based products may be envisaged within the food or material industry. RESULT...