Toxic compounds in sewage or industrial wastewater may inhibit the biological activity of activated sludge impairing the treatment process. This paper evaluates the Inhibition Capacity Index (ICI) for the assessment of activated sludge in the presence of toxicants. In this study, activated sludge was obtained from industrial treatment plants and was also synthetically produced. Continuous respi...

The removal of linear alkylbenzene sulfonate (LAS) was evaluated in a UASB reactor using shortchain alcohols (ethanol and methanol) and complex co-substrate (yeast extract). Using only methanol and ethanol as co-substrates resulted in removal of LAS between 30 and 41%. At the end, addition of a complex substrate (yeast extract) increased the removal of LAS to 50%. During the assay, water supply...

Sequential injection immunoassay systems for environmental measurements based on the selective immunoreaction between antigen and antibody were described. A sequential injection analysis (SIA) technique is suitable to be applied for the procedure of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), because the washing and the addition of reagent solutions can be automated by using a computer-controll...

Sewage sludge applied to agricultural soils often contains considerable amounts of linear alkylbenzene sulfonates (LAS). Toxic effects of LAS on soil organisms should, therefore. be evaluated to ensure safe use of sewage sludge as a fertilizer. In this study, dose-response relationships for the toxicity of Na-LAS to six species of soil invertebrates (survival, reproduction, and growth) were est...

Biphenyl dioxygenase (Bph Dox) catalyzes the initial oxygenation of biphenyl and related compounds. Bph Dox is a multicomponent enzyme in which a large subunit (encoded by the bphA1 gene) is significantly responsible for substrate specificity. By using the process of DNA shuffling of bphA1 of Pseudomonas pseudoalcaligenes KF707 and Burkholderia cepacia LB400, a number of evolved Bph Dox enzymes...

Frontier molecular orbital (FMO) theory coupled with density functional calculations has been applied to investigate the chemical 2 2 22 reactivity of three key bioinorganic Cu –O complexes, the mononuclear end-on hydroperoxo-Cu(II), the side-on bridged m–h :h –O n 2 2 Cu(II) dimer and the bis-m-oxo Cu(III) dimer. Two acceptor orbitals (s* and p*) of each complex and two types of donating subst...

Microbial proteases, especially from Bacillus spp., have been widely exploited for a broad variety of applications, such as the improvement cleaning efficiency conventional detergents. In this work, statistical design experiment was used to optimize concentrations three-component mixture: licheniformis SMIA-2 protease, Linear Alkylbenzene Sulphate and hydrogen peroxide, in an attempt prepare en...