Influence of different anoxic time exposures on active biomass, protozoa and filamentous bacteria in activated sludge.

Medium-sized wastewater treatment plants are considered too small to implement anaerobic digestion technologies and too large for extensive treatments. A promising option as a sewage sludge reduction method is the inclusion of anoxic time exposures. In the present study, three different anoxic time exposures of 12, 6 and 4 hours have been studied to reduce sewage sludge production. The best anoxic time exposure was observed under anoxic/oxic cycles of 6 hours, which reduced 29.63% of the biomass production compared with the oxic control conditions. The sludge under different anoxic time exposures, even with a lower active biomass concentration than the oxic control conditions, showed a much higher metabolic activity than the oxic control conditions. Microbiological results suggested that both protozoa density and abundance of filamentous bacteria decrease under anoxic time exposures compared to oxic control conditions. The anoxic time exposures 6/6 showed the highest reduction in both protozoa density, 37.5%, and abundance of filamentous bacteria, 41.1%, in comparison to the oxic control conditions. The groups of crawling ciliates, carnivorous ciliates and filamentous bacteria were highly influenced by the anoxic time exposures. Protozoa density and abundance of filamentous bacteria have been shown as promising bioindicators of biomass production reduction.

Simulated annealing algorithm for the multiple sequence alignment problem: the approach of polymers in a random medium.

We propose a probabilistic algorithm to solve the multiple sequence alignment problem. The algorithm is a simulated annealing that exploits the representation of the multiple alignment between D sequences as a directed polymer in D dimensions. Within this representation we can easily track the evolution of the alignment through local moves of low computational cost. In contrast with other probabilistic algorithms proposed to solve this problem, our approach allows the creation and deletion of gaps without extra computational cost. The algorithm was tested by aligning proteins from the kinase family. When D=3 the results are consistent with those obtained using a complete algorithm. For D>3 where the complete algorithm fails, we show that our algorithm still converges to reasonable alignments. We also study the space of solutions obtained and show that depending on the number of sequences aligned the solutions are organized in different ways, suggesting a possible source of errors for progressive algorithms. Finally, we test our algorithm in artificially generated sequences and prove that it may perform better than progressive algorithms. Moreover, in those cases in which a progressive algorithm works better, its solution may be taken as an initial condition of our algorithm and, again, we obtain alignments with lower scores and more relevant from the biological point of view.

Ergodicity and quantum correlations in irrational triangular billiards.

Pseudochaotic properties are systematically investigated in a one-parameter family of irrational triangular billiards (all angles irrational with π). The absolute value of the position correlation function C(x)(t) decays like ~t(-α). Fast (α≈1) and slow (0<α<1) decays are observed, thus indicating that the irrational triangles do not share a unique ergodic dynamics, which, instead, may vary smoothly between the opposite limits of strong mixing (α=1) and regular behaviors (α=0). Upgrading previous data, spectral statistical properties of the quantized counterparts are computed from 150000 energy eigenvalues numerically calculated for each billiard. Gaussian orthogonal ensemble spectral fluctuations are observed when α≈1 and intermediate statistics are found otherwise. Our irrational billiards have zero Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy and essentially infinity genus. Thus, differently from previous works on rational (pseudointegrable) enclosures, our results provide a missing classical-quantum correspondence regarding the ergodic hierarchy for a set of nonchaotic systems that might enjoy the strong mixing property.