Lycopene Production by Mated Fermentation of Blakeslea trispora.

Lycopene is a carotenoid mainly present in red-colored fruits and vegetables. Its value in the pharmaceutical and food industry is linked to its benefits for the human health, including properties against cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and its use as a food colorant. Lycopene can be produced either by synthetic or natural means, but there is a preference for the second, since it is considered a more eco-friendly and less harmful process.

PPCPs wet weather mobilization in a combined sewer in NW Spain.

An intense campaign was carried out over a 14 month period to characterize concentrations and loads of 7 well-known Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs), during dry and wet weather conditions, in an urban combined catchment in the northwest of Spain, a geographical zone with an average annual rainfall over 1500 mm. The main objective was to gather more in-depth knowledge of the mobilization of these "micropollutants" in an urban combined sewer and the possible pressures on water receiving bodies due to combined sewer overflows (CSOs). Hydrographs and pollutographs of these substances in dry weather flows (DWF), on weekdays and weekends, and wet weather flows (WWF) during 10 rain events have been characterized to obtain data that are sufficiently representative for statistical analysis.

Overland flow computations in urban and industrial catchments from direct precipitation data using a two-dimensional shallow water model.

This paper presents the experimental validation and the application to a real industrial catchment of a two-dimensional depth-averaged shallow water model used for the computation of rainfall-runoff transformation from direct precipitation data. Instead of using the common approach in flood inundation modelling, which consists in computing the water depth and velocity fields given the water discharge, in this study the rainfall intensity is imposed directly in the model, the surface runoff being generated automatically. The model considers infiltration losses simultaneously with flow simulation.

Cloning and sequence analysis of a low temperature-induced gene from trifoliate orange with unusual pre-mRNA processing.

Exposure of cold-hardy Rubidoux trifoliate orange [Poncirus trifoliata (L) Raf.] plants to temperatures from 28 degrees C to -5 degrees C enabled us to isolate and characterize a novel citrus low-temperature gene (CLT) with two transcripts, called CLTa and CLTb, from leaves and stems. CLTa was produced when plants were subjected to low temperatures (starting at 10 degrees C), while CLTb was constitutively expressed.

Mining DNA microarray data using a novel approach based on graph theory.

The recent demonstration that biochemical pathways from diverse organisms are arranged in scale-free, rather than random, systems [Jeong et al., Nature 407 (2000) 651-654], emphasizes the importance of developing methods for the identification of biochemical nexuses--the nodes within biochemical pathways that serve as the major input/output hubs, and therefore represent potentially important targets for modulation. Here we describe a bioinformatics approach that identifies candidate nexuses for biochemical pathways without requiring functional gene annotation; we also provide proof-of-principle experiments to support this technique.