Tertiary treatment of coke-oven wastewater using suspended and immobilized whole live cells of constructed bacterial-microalgal consortium: modeling and optimization using ANN-GA hybrid methodology.

Coke-oven wastewater (CW), containing an array of toxic pollutants above permissible limits even after conventional primary and secondary treatment, needs a tertiary (polishing) step to meet the statutory limit. In the present study, a suitable bacterial-microalgal consortium (Culture C) was constructed using bacterial (Culture B: Bacillus sp. NITD 19) and microalgal (Culture A: a consortium of Chlorella sp. and Synechococcus sp.) cultures at different ratios (v/v) and the potential of these cultures for tertiary treatment of CW was assessed. Culture C4 (Culture B:Culture A = 1:4) with inoculum size: 10% (v/v) was selected for the treatment of wastewater since the maximum growth (3.08 ± 0.57 g/L) and maximum chlorophyll content (4.05 ± 0.66 mg/L) were achieved for such culture in PLE-enriched BG-11 medium. During treatment of real secondary treated coke-oven effluent using Culture C4 in a closed photobioreactor, the removal of phenol (80.32 ± 2.76%), ammonium ions (47.85 ± 1.83%), fluoride (65.0 ± 4.12%), and nitrate (39.45 ± 3.42%) was observed after 24 h. In a packed bed bioreactor containing immobilized C4 culture, the maximum removal was obtained at the lowest flow rate (20 mL/h) and highest column bed height (20 cm). Artificial intelligence-based techniques were used for modeling and optimization of the process.

Phycoremediation of pollutants from secondary treated coke-oven wastewater using poultry litter as nutrient source: a cost-effective polishing technique.

This article focuses on the phycoremediation of pollutants from secondary treated coke-oven effluent through a green and economical route. A microalgal sample was collected and identified as a consortium of Chlorella sp. and Synechococcus sp. The culture cost was reduced by using poultry litter extract as supplementary material to BG-11 medium. Since the major pollutants present in real secondary treated coke-oven wastewater are phenol, ammoniacal-N (NH4+) and cyanide, several matrices were designed with these three major pollutants by varying their initial concentrations such as phenol (2-10 mg/L), cyanide (0.3-1 mg/L) and NH4+ (100-200 mg/L), termed as simulated secondary treated coke-oven wastewater. Maximum removal was observed with individual solutions of phenol (4 mg/L), cyanide (0.6 mg/L) and NH4+ (175 mg/L), while maximum removal in simulated secondary treated coke-oven wastewater was observed at higher concentrations of phenol (8 mg/L) and cyanide (0.8 mg/L) and the same concentration of NH4+ (175 mg/L). A consortium was found effective to meet statutory limits of pollutants. Kinetic model was developed for predicting growth of consortium and observed that the poultry litter extract-enriched BG-11 medium showed higher values of maximum specific growth rate (0.56 per day) and carrying capacity (1,330 mg/L) than that in BG-11 medium only.

Evaluation of fluoride bioremediation and production of biomolecules by living cyanobacteria under fluoride stress condition.

Application of microalgae for defluoridation has gained interest in recent years. In the present study, bioremediation of fluoride using living cyanobacteria, Starria zimbabweensis, collected from wastewater of coke-oven effluent treatment plant, Durgapur, India, has been investigated. Initially, the cyanobacterial strain was grown in BG11 medium at 25°C, 45µmol/m2/s irradiation in 18h: 6h light:dark cycle in an algal incubator. Samples were withdrawn after 2 days interval and analyzed for its dry biomass and lipid content. Optimum inoculum size of 10% and age of 16th day were assessed based on maximum dry biomass (9.307 ± 0.01g/L) and lipid (244.05 ± 0.02mg/L) production. SEM-EDX and FTIR studies of both native and fluoride treated biomass were done to emphasize the changes. During kinetic study of defluoridation, initial fluoride concentration was varied in the range of 10-50mg/L. Maximum fluoride removal (66.6 ± 0.11%) and dry biomass (18.19 ± 0.12g/L) were obtained at 10mg/L fluoride concentration using 10% of 16th day's inoculum. Biomass and lipid content were found to increase 2 and 4 folds, respectively under fluoride stress condition. Furthermore, chlorophyll, carbohydrate and protein content of the biomass were also compared between control and fluoride contaminated conditions. Fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME) analysis was done using Gas Chromatography (GC) to compare the lipid profile of native and fluoride loaded strain.

Sequestration of carbon dioxide and production of biomolecules using cyanobacteria.

A cyanobacterial strain, Synechococcus sp. NIT18, has been applied to sequester CO2 using sodium carbonate as inorganic carbon source due to its efficiency of CO2 bioconversion and high biomass production. The biomass obtained is used for the extraction of biomolecules - protein, carbohydrate and lipid. The main objective of the study is to maximize the biomass and biomolecules production with CO2 sequestration using cyanobacterial strain cultivated under different concentrations of CO2 (5-20%), pH (7-11) and inoculum size (5-12.5%) within a statistical framework. Maximum sequestration of CO2 and maximum productivities of protein, carbohydrate and lipid are 71.02%, 4.9 mg/L/day, 6.7 mg/L/day and 1.6 mg/L/day respectively, at initial CO2 concentration: 10%, pH: 9 and inoculum size: 12.5%. Since flue gas contains 10-15% CO2 and the present strain is able to sequester CO2 in this range, the strain could be considered as a useful tool for CO2 mitigation for greener world.

Fourier-transform-infrared-spectroscopy based spectral-biomarker selection towards optimum diagnostic differentiation of oral leukoplakia and cancer.

In search of specific label-free biomarkers for differentiation of two oral lesions, namely oral leukoplakia (OLK) and oral squamous-cell carcinoma (OSCC), Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy was performed on paraffin-embedded tissue sections from 47 human subjects (eight normal (NOM), 16 OLK, and 23 OSCC). Difference between mean spectra (DBMS), Mann-Whitney's U test, and forward feature selection (FFS) techniques were used for optimising spectral-marker selection. Classification of diseases was performed with linear and quadratic support vector machine (SVM) at 10-fold cross-validation, using different combinations of spectral features. It was observed that six features obtained through FFS enabled differentiation of NOM and OSCC tissue (1782, 1713, 1665, 1545, 1409, and 1161 cm(-1)) and were most significant, able to classify OLK and OSCC with 81.3 % sensitivity, 95.7 % specificity, and 89.7 % overall accuracy. The 43 spectral markers extracted through Mann-Whitney's U Test were the least significant when quadratic SVM was used. Considering the high sensitivity and specificity of the FFS technique, extracting only six spectral biomarkers was thus most useful for diagnosis of OLK and OSCC, and to overcome inter and intra-observer variability experienced in diagnostic best-practice histopathological procedure. By considering the biochemical assignment of these six spectral signatures, this work also revealed altered glycogen and keratin content in histological sections which could able to discriminate OLK and OSCC. The method was validated through spectral selection by the DBMS technique. Thus this method has potential for diagnostic cost minimisation for oral lesions by label-free biomarker identification.

Enhancement of nutritional value of fried fish using an artificial intelligence approach.

Frying affects the nutritional quality of fish detrimentally. In this study, using Catla catla and mustard oil, experiments were carried out in varying temperatures (140-240 °C), times (5-20 min), and oil amounts (25-100 ml/kg of fish) which established drastic reduction of 44.97% and 99.40% for polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA)/saturated fatty acids (SFA) and index of atherogenicity (IA) profile, respectively. Artificial neural network (ANN) was implemented successfully to provide an association between the independent inputs with dependent outputs (values of R2 were 0.99 and 0.98; RMSE were 0.038 and 0.046; and performance were 0.038 and 0.067 for PUFA/SFA and IA, respectively) by exhaustive search of various algorithms and activation functions available in literature. ANN model-based meta-heuristic, stochastic optimization formalisms, genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), were applied to optimize the combination of cooking parameters for improving the nutritional quality of food which improved the nutritional value by maximizing the PUFA/SFA profile up to 63.05% and minimizing the IA profile to 99.64%. Multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) was also employed to tune the inputs by maintaining a balance between the contrasting outputs and enhance the overall food value simultaneously with multi-objective (beneficial for health, economic, and environment-friendly) proposal. MOGA was able to improve the PUFA/SFA profile up to 44.76% and reduce the IA profile to 92.94% concurrently with the reduction of wastage of culinary media and energy consumption, following the optimized cooking condition (118.92 °C, 6.06 min, 40 ml oil/kg of fish).

Tandem Detection of Sub-Nano Molar Level CN- and Hg2+ in Aqueous Medium by a Suitable Molecular Sensor: A Viable Solution for Detection of CN- and Development of the RGB-Based Sensory Device.

An inimitable urea-based multichannel chemosensor, DTPH [1,5-bis-(2,6-dichloro-4-(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)carbonohydrazide], was examined to be highly proficient to recognize CN- based on the H-bonding interaction between sensor -NH moiety and CN- in aqueous medium with explicit selectivity. In the absorption spectral titration of DTPH, a new peak at higher wavelength was emerged in titrimetric analytical studies of CN- with the zero-order reaction kinetics affirming the substantial sensor-analyte interaction. The isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) experiment further affirmed that the sensing process was highly spontaneous with the Gibbs free energy of -26 × 104 cal/mol. The binding approach between DTPH and CN- was also validated by more than a few experimental studies by means of several spectroscopic tools along with the theoretical calculations. A very low detection limit of the chemosensor toward CN- (0.15 ppm) further instigated to design an RGB-based sensory device based on the colorimetric upshots of the chemosensor in order to develop a distinct perception regarding the presence of innocuous or precarious level of the CN- in a contaminated solution. Moreover, the reversibility of the sensor in the presence of CN- and Hg2+ originated a logic gate mimic ensemble. Additionally, the real-field along with the in vitro CN- detection efficiency of the photostable DTPH was also accomplished by using various biological specimens.

Bioremediation of phenol from synthetic and real wastewater using Leptolyngbya sp.: a comparison and assessment of lipid production.

Bioremediation of wastewater is gaining popularity over chemical treatment due to the greener aspect. The volume of literature containing algal biodegradation is small. Especially, removal of toxic materials like phenol from coke-oven wastewater using fast-growing cyanobacteria was not tried. The current study, therefore, targeted at bioremediation of phenol from wastewater using Leptolyngbya sp., a cyanobacterial strain, as a finishing step. Furthermore, the growth of the strain was studied under different conditions, varying phenol concentration 50-150 mg/L, pH 5-11, inoculum size 2-10% to assess its ability to produce lipid. The strain was initially grown in BG-11 as a reference medium and later in phenolic solution. The strain was found to sustain 150 mg/L concentration of phenol. SEM study had shown the clear difference in the structure of cyanobacterial strain when grown in pure BG-11 medium and phenolic solution. Maximum removal of phenol (98.5 ± 0.14%) was achieved with an initial concentration 100 mg/L, 5% inoculum size at pH 11, while the maximum amount of dry biomass (0.38 ± 0.02 g/L) was obtained at pH 7, initial phenol concentration of 50 mg/L, and 5% inoculum size. Highest lipid yield was achieved at pH 11, initial phenol concentration of 100 mg/L, and 5% inoculum size. Coke-oven wastewater collected from secondary clarifier of effluent treatment plant was also treated with the said strain and the removal of different pollutants was observed. The study suggests the utilization of such potential cyanobacterial strain in treating industrial effluent containing phenol.

Validated Stability-Indicating RP-HPLC Method for the Estimation of Degradation Behaviour of Organic Peroxide and Third-Generation Synthetic Retinoids in Topical Pharmaceutical Dosage Formulation.

The objective of the current study was to establish a validated stability-indicating, high-performance liquid chromatographic method to determine the purity of benzoyl peroxide (BPO) and adapalene (ADP) in the presence of its impurities, forced degradation products, and placebo in pharmaceutical dosage forms. The desired chromatographic separation was achieved on the Kinetex(™) C18 (250 × 4.6 mm, 5 µm) column using gradient elution at 272 nm detection wavelength. The optimized mobile phase consisted of solvent A (mixture of 0.1% v/v glacial acetic acid in water and acetonitrile in the ratio of 80:20 v/v, respectively) and solvent B (mixture of acetonitrile: tetrahydrofuran: methanol in the ratio of 50:30:20 v/v/v, respectively). The stability-indicating capability of the developed method was established by analysing forced degradation samples in which the spectral purity of BPO and ADP along with separation of all degradation products from the analyte peaks was achieved. The developed method was validated as per ICH guidelines with respect to specificity, linearity, limit of detection, limit of quantification, accuracy, precision, and robustness.

Quality by Design-Based Development of a Stability-Indicating RP-HPLC Method for the Simultaneous Determination of Methylparaben, Propylparaben, Diethylamino Hydroxybenzoyl Hexyl Benzoate, and Octinoxate in Topical Pharmaceutical Formulation.

A stability-indicating RP-HPLC method has been developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of methylparaben (MP), propylparaben (PP), diethylamino hydroxybenzoyl hexyl benzoate (DAHHB), and octinoxate (OCT) in topical pharmaceutical formulation. The desired chromatographic separation was achieved on the Kinetex(TM) C18 (250 × 4.6 mm, 5 µm) column using gradient elution at 257 nm detection wavelength. The optimized mobile phase consisted of a buffer : acetonitrile : tetrahydrofuran (60 : 30 : 10, v/v/v) as solvent A and acetonitrile : tetrahydrofuran (70 : 30, v/v) as solvent B. The method showed linearity over the range of 0.19-148.4 µg/mL, 0.23-15.3 µg/mL, 1.97-600.5 µg/mL, and 1.85-451.5 µg/mL for MP, PP, DAHHB, and OCT, respectively. Recovery for all the components was found to be in the range of 98-102%. The stability-indicating capability of the developed method was established by analysing the forced degradation samples in which the spectral purity of MP, PP, DAHHB, and OCT, along with the separation of the degradation products from the analyte peaks, was achieved. The proposed method was successfully applied for the quantitative determination of MP, PP, DAHHB, and OCT in the lotion sample. The design expert with ANOVA software with the linear model was applied and a 2(4) full factorial design was employed to estimate the model coefficients and also to check the robustness of the method. Results of the two-level full factorial design, 2(4) with 20 runs including four centrepoint analysis based on the variance analysis (ANOVA), demonstrated that all four factors, as well as the interactions of resolution between DAHHB and OCT are statistically significant.

Development and Validation of a Stability-Indicating RP-HPLC Method for the Simultaneous Determination of Phenoxyethanol, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, Mometasone Furoate, and Tazarotene in Topical Pharmaceutical Dosage Formulation.

A stability-indicating RP-HPLC method has been developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of phenoxyethanol (PE), methylparaben (MP), propylparaben (PP), mometasone furoate (MF), and tazarotene (TA) in topical pharmaceutical dosage formulation. The desired chromatographic separation was achieved on the Waters X-Bridge™ C18 (50×4.6mm, 3.5µ) column using gradient elution at 256 nm detection wavelength. The optimized mobile phase consisted of 0.1%v/v orthophosphoric acid in water as solvent-A and acetonitrile as solvent-B. The method showed linearity over the range of 5.88-61.76 µg/mL, 0.18-62.36 µg/mL, 0.17-6.26 µg/mL, 0.47-31.22 µg/mL, and 0.44-30.45 µg/mL for PE, MP, PP, MF, and TA, respectively. The recovery for all of the components was in the range of 98-102%. The stability-indicating capability of the developed method was established by analysing the forced degradation samples, in which the spectral purity of PE, MP, PP, MF, and TA along with the separation of degradation products from the analyte peaks was achieved. The proposed method was successfully applied for the quantitative determination of PE, MP, PP, MF, and TA in a cream sample.

Shedding off specific lipid constituents from sperm cell membrane during cryopreservation.

Membrane damage is one of the main reasons for reduced motility and fertility of sperm cells during cryopreservation. Using a model system of sperm cryopreservation developed in our laboratory, we have investigated the detailed changes due to cryopreservation in the plasma membrane lipid composition of the goat epididymal sperm cells. Total lipid and its components, i.e., neutral lipids, glycolipids and phospholipids decreased significantly after cryopreservation. Among neutral lipids sterols, steryl esters and 1-O-alkyl-2,3-diacyl glycerols decreased appreciably, while among phospholipids, major loss was observed for phosphatidyl choline and phosphatidyl ethanolamine. Unsaturated fatty acids bound to the phospholipids diminished while the percentage of saturated acids increased. The cholesterol:phospholipid ratio enhanced and the amount of hydrocarbon, which was unusually high, increased further on cryopreservation. The data indicates that profound increase of the hydrophobicity of the cell membrane is one of the major mechanisms by which spermatozoa acquire potential to resist or combat stress factors like cryodamage. The results are compatible with the view that for survival against cryodamage, sperm cells modulate the structure of their outer membrane by shedding off preferentially some hydrophilic lipid constituents of the cell membrane.