Biogas upgrading to methane and removal of volatile organic compounds in a system of zero-valent iron and anaerobic granular sludge

The current study presented a novel process of biogas upgrading to biomethane (higher than 97%) based on anaerobic sludge and zero-valent iron (ZVI) system. When ZVI was added into an aquatic system with anaerobic granular sludge (AnGrSl) under anaerobic abiotic conditions, H2 was generated. Then, the H2 and CO2 were converted by the hydrogenotrophic methanogens to CH4. Biogas upgrading to biomethane was achieved in 4 days in the AnGrSl system (50 g L-1 ZVI, initial pH 5 and 20 g L-1 NaHCO3). In this system, when zero-valent scrap iron (ZVSI) was added instead of ZVI, a more extended period (21 days) was required to achieve biogas upgrading. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis revealed that the materials in a reactor with CO2 or biogas headspace, exhibited a mixture of ferrite and the iron carbonate phase of siderite (FeCO3), with the latter being the dominant phase. VOCs analysis in raw biogas (in the system of anaerobic sludge and ZVI) highlighted the reduction of low mass straight- and branched-chain alkanes (C6-C10). Also, H2S and NH3 were found to be substantially reduced when the anaerobic sludge was exposed to ZVI compared to the cases where ZVI was not added. This study found that simultaneously with biogas upgrading, VOCs, H2S and NH3 can be removed in a system of ZVI or ZVSI and AnGrSl under aquatic anaerobic conditions

Parallel accelerators for GlimmerHMM bioinformatics algorithm

Summarization: In the last decades there is an exponential growth in the amount of genomic data that need to be analyzed. A very important problem in biology is the extraction of the biologically functional genomic DNA from the actual genome of the organisms. There have been proposed many computational biology algorithms that solve the gene finding problem which utilize various approaches; GlimmerHMM is considered one of the most efficient such algorithms. This paper presents two different accelerators for the GlimmerHMM algorithm. One of them is implemented on a modern FPGA platform exploiting the parallelism that reconfigurable logic offers and the other one utilizes a GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) taking advantage of a highly multithreaded operational environment. The performance of the implemented systems is compared against the one achieved when the official distribution of the algorithm is executed on a high-end multi-core server; the speedup initiated, for the most compute intensive part, is up to 200× for the FPGA-based system and up to 34× for the GPU-based system.Παρουσιάστηκε στο: Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibitio

Risk characterisation of ciguatera poisoning in Europe

The EuroCigua project main objective is to characterize the risk of Ciguatera Poisoning (CP) in Europe including several specific objectives: to determine the incidence of ciguatera in Europe and the epidemiological characteristics of cases; to assess the presence of ciguatoxin in food and the environment in Europe and to develop and validate methods for the detection, quantification and confirmation of the presence of ciguatoxin contaminated specimens. This report compiles the activities carried out during the EuroCigua project from the signing in April 2016 until December 2020. The present document corresponds to Deliverable No. 6: “Final Scientific Report” on Risk characterization of ciguatera food poisoning in Europe of the Specific Agreement no. 1 “MANAGEMENT AND SCIENTIFIC COORDINATION” within the Framework Partnership Agreement GP/EFSA/AFSCO/2015/03 “Risk characterization of ciguatera food poisoning in Europe”