Occurrence of pharmaceutically active and non-steroidal estrogenic compounds in three different wastewater recycling schemes in Australia.

The discovery that natural and synthetic chemicals, in the form of excreted hormones and pharmaceuticals, as well as a vast array of compounds with domestic and industrial applications, can enter the environment via wastewater treatment plants and cause a wide variety of environmental and health problems even at very low concentrations, suggests the need for improvement of water recycling. Three Australian wastewater recycling schemes, two of which employ reverse osmosis (RO) technology, the other applying ozonation and biological activated carbon filtration, have been studied for their ability to remove trace organic contaminants including 11 pharmaceutically active compounds and two non-steroidal estrogenic compounds. Contaminant concentrations were determined using a sensitive analytical method comprising solid phase extraction, derivatization and GC with MS using selected ion monitoring.

Biosynthesis of natural-synthetic hybrid copolymers: polyhydroxyoctanoate-diethylene glycol.

A new natural-synthetic hybrid biomaterial has been isolated from the growth of Pseudomonas oleovorans in the presence of diethylene glycol (DEG). DEG was consumed by P. oleovorans with 20 mM sodium octanoate in modified E* medium, but its presence in the fermentation medium retarded cell growth and viability, influencing production and composition of polyhydroxyalkanoates with medium chain length substituents (mclPHAs) and consequently attenuating PHA yield.