Source segregated food waste was collected from domestic properties and its composition determined together with the average weight produced per household, which was 2.91 kg per week. The waste was fed over a trial period lasting 58 weeks to an identical pair of 1.5 m(3) anaerobic digesters, one at a mesophilic (36.5 degrees C) and the other at a thermophilic temperature (56 degrees C). The dig...

Understanding how proteins adapt to function at high temperatures is important for deciphering the energetics that dictate protein stability and folding. While multiple principles important for thermostability have been identified, we lack a unified understanding of how internal protein structural and chemical environment determine qualitative or quantitative impact of evolutionary mutations. I...

OBJECTIVE The study was designed to test for the existence of a correlation between the total population of aerobic mesophilic microorganisms in processed raw breastmilk from a human milk bank and the Dornic acidity of that milk. METHODS Two hundred consecutive samples of thawed expressed human breastmilk obtained from human milk bank, prior to pasteurization. Dornic acidity was titrated in t...

BACKGROUND Thermophilic enzymes are often less active than their mesophilic homologues at low temperatures. One hypothesis to explain this observation is that the extra stabilizing interactions increase the rigidity of thermophilic enzymes and hence reduce their activity. Here we employed a thermophilic acylphosphatase from Pyrococcus horikoshii and its homologous mesophilic acylphosphatase fro...

Current microbial methodologies to determine fish quality are laborious and have long time required to obtain results. The impediometric technique as a rapid sensitive method was used to determine the correlation between impedance detection times (IDTs) and conventional reference psychrophilic and mesophilic plate counts of fish in order to develop models for predicting the microbial quality an...

The disposal of excess sludge from wastewater treatment plants is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Temperature-phased anaerobic digestion (TPAD) which combines thermophilic and mesophilic processes in one, brings together the advantages of both systems. The aim of the present work was to develop a simple kinetic model to describe the TPAD of sewage sludge in batch completely stirre...

A mesophilic (37 C) and a thermophilic (55 C) two-chamber microbial fuel cell (MFC) were studied and compared for their power production from xylose and the microbial communities involved. The anodeattached, membrane-attached, and planktonic microbial communities, and their respective active subpopulations, were determined by next generation sequencing (Illumina MiSeq), based on the presence an...

The natural contamination of foods with a bacterial pathogen frequently consists of a mixture of strains with their own characteristics of survival, growth potential and virulence. Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) must account for this genetic diversity to reflect the variability of the pathogen risk and to identify the genetic groups present at key stages of the food pathway. To d...

As a first step of treatment of landfill leachates (total COD – 1,430-3,810 mg/l, total nitrogen 90162 mg/l), a performance of laboratory UASB reactors has been investigated under mesophilic (30 C), sub-mesophilic (20 C) and psychrophilic (10 C) conditions. Under hydraulic retention times (HRT) of around 7 h, when the average organic loading rates (OLR) were around 5 g COD/l/day, the total COD ...

Production of psychrophilic enzymes in the commonly used mesophilic expression systems is hampered by low intrinsic stability of the recombinant enzymes at the optimal host growth temperatures. Unless strategies for low-temperature expression are advanced, research on psychrophilic enzymes may end up being biased toward those that can be stably produced in commonly used mesophilic host systems....