Desalination, Water Re-use, and Halophyte Cultivation in Salinized Regions: A Highly Productive Groundwater Treatment System.

Groundwater salinization is a problem affecting access to water in many world regions. Though desalination by conventional reverse osmosis (RO) can upgrade groundwater quality for drinking, its disadvantages include unmanaged brine discharge and accelerated groundwater depletion. Here, we propose a new approach combining RO, forward osmosis (FO), and halophyte cultivation, in which FO optimally adjusts the concentration of the RO reject brine for irrigation of Salicornia or Sarcocornia. The FO also re-uses wastewater, thus, reducing groundwater extraction and the wastewater effluent volume. To suit different groundwater salinities in the range 1-8 g/L, three practical designs are proposed and analyzed. Results include specific groundwater consumption (SGC), specific energy consumption (SEC), wastewater volume reduction, peak RO pressure, permeate water quality, efficiency of water resource utilization, and halophyte yield. Compared to conventional brackish water RO, the results show superior performance in almost all aspects. For example, SGC is reduced from 1.25 to 0.9 m3 per m3 of drinking water output and SEC is reduced from 0.79 to 0.70 kW h/m3 by a FO-RO-FO system treating groundwater of salinity 8 g/L. This system can produce 1.1 m3 of high-quality drinking water and up to 4.9 kg of edible halophyte per m3 of groundwater withdrawn.

Oat Doubled Haploids Following Maize Pollination.

Doubled haploids (DHs) are an important tool for the accelerated production of new crop varieties. In oat, DHs were first produced by pollinating oat florets with maize pollen. The resultant embryos spontaneously eliminate the maize chromosomes leaving a haploid complement of oat chromosomes. These embryos can be cultured in vitro using the "embryo rescue" technique to produce haploid plants whose chromosome number can be doubled with colchicine to produce homozygous DH oat plants.

In vitro culture for doubled haploids: tools for molecular breeding.

Doubled haploid (DH) techniques using immature microspores or embryos rescued in vitro following interspecific hybridization are important tools for breeding wheat and barley and for generating populations for gene mapping purposes. Here, we describe methods being used for the successful production of spring wheat and barley DHs in Australia.

Analysis of clogging in constructed wetlands using magnetic resonance.

In this work we demonstrate the potential of permanent magnet based magnetic resonance sensors to monitor and assess the extent of pore clogging in water filtration systems. The performance of the sensor was tested on artificially clogged gravel substrates and on gravel bed samples from constructed wetlands used to treat wastewater. Data indicate that the spin lattice relaxation time is linearly related to the hydraulic conductivity in such systems. In addition, within biologically active filters we demonstrate the ability to determine the relative ratio of biomass to abiotic solids, a measurement which is not possible using alternative techniques.

Regeneration of fertile green plants from oat isolated microspore culture.

Regeneration of fertile green plants from isolated oat microspores is reported for the first time. Factors critical for microspore growth and regeneration include cold pre-treatment, pH of culture medium and the use of conditioned culture medium. It was found that cold pre-treatment at 4 degrees C in the dark for a minimum of 6 weeks was necessary to consistently achieve microspore growth into multicellular structures (MCS). Longer pre-treatments of up to 9 weeks were tested and found to be positively correlated with the number of MCS produced. Microspore culture medium with pH 8.0 produced significantly more MCS larger than eight cells in size than media with pH 5.8. The use of medium conditioned by actively growing barley microspores significantly increased the numbers of MCS larger than eight cells in size compared to non-conditioned media. Plants were regenerated only from cultures using conditioned medium. A total of 2 green plants and 15 albinos were regenerated. Of the green plants, one had the haploid chromosome complement (n = 3x = 21) and the other had the parental hexaploid chromosome complement (2n = 6x = 42) which may be due to spontaneous chromosome doubling. The hexaploid plant set seed naturally and the haploid plant set seed after its chromosome complement was doubled with colchicine.