Heterotrophic growth of microalgae presents significant economic advantages over the more common autotrophic cultivation. The efficiency of growth and nitrogen, phosphorus, and glucose uptake from synthetic wastewater was compared under heterotrophic, autotrophic, and mixotrophic regimes of Chlorella vulgaris Beij. immobilized in alginate beads, either alone or with the bacterium Azospirillum b...

We tested whether standing autotrophic (unicellular algal) biomass is sensitive to variation in initial consumer (nondecomposer, heterotrophic protistan) diversity in experimental microbial microcosms. Our results showed a strong, negative relationship between autotrophic biomass and consumer species richness. Additional microcosm experiments showed that this relationship was due largely to the...

Soil carbon in permafrost ecosystems has the potential to become a major positive feedback to climate change if permafrost thaw increases heterotrophic decomposition. However, warming can also stimulate autotrophic production leading to increased ecosystem carbon storage-a negative climate change feedback. Few studies partitioning ecosystem respiration examine decadal warming effects or compare...

Nitrate-reducing Fe(II)-oxidizing microorganisms were described for the first time ca. 20 years ago. Most pure cultures of nitrate-reducing Fe(II) oxidizers can oxidize Fe(II) only under mixotrophic conditions, i.e., when an organic cosubstrate is provided. A small number of nitrate-reducing Fe(II)-oxidizing cultures have been proposed to grow autotrophically, but unambiguous evidence for autot...

Sulfur-based autotrophic denitrification processes utilize autotrophic denitrifiers, such as Thiobacillus denitrificans and Thiomicrospira denitrificans, to reduce nitrate to nitrogen gas. Bench-scale experiments were conducted to evaluate the sulfur-based autotrophic denitrification process. This paper addresses three issues: (1) start-up and operation of a CSTR to provide an adequate seed sou...

Chlorella pyrenoidosa was cultivated under photoautotrophic, mixotrophic and cyclic light-autotrophic/dark-heterotrophic conditions. The influence of light on the carbon and energy metabolism of microalgae was investigated by the use of metabolic flux analysis. The respiratory activity of microalgae in the light was assessed from the autotrophic flux distribution. Results showed that the glycol...

The strong advances in synthetic biology enable the engineering of novel functions and complex biological features in unprecedented ways, such as implementing synthetic autotrophic metabolism into heterotrophic hosts. A key challenge for the sustainable production of fuels and chemicals entails the engineering of synthetic autotrophic organisms that can effectively and efficiently fix carbon di...

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a major odorous component emitted from construction and demolition debris landfills, has received increasing attention. Although cover materials such as soil and compost are recommended to be used routinely to control an odor problem from the landfills, the problem still remains. Autotrophic denitrification may have environmental applications including treatment of water...

Plagiarism causes a serious concern in scientific literature. I distinguish two types of plagiarism. What is routinely highlighted and discussed is the reprehensible type of stealing another author's ideas and words. This type I categorize as "heterotrophic" plagiarism. A more prevalent and less-discussed type of plagiarism is the verbatim use of same sentences repetitively by authors in their ...