Industrial chemistry and chemoecology are linked together to realize a modern and sustainable chemistry

Meeting society's needs without damaging the environment requires new ways of thinking. The link of industrial chemistry and chemoecology will be one of the key factors of sustainable development within the chemicals industry

Paclobutrazol treatment as a potential strategy for higher seed and oil yield in field-grown camelina sativa L. Crantz

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Camelina (Camelina sativa </it>L. Crantz) is a non-food oilseed crop which holds promise as an alternative biofuel energy resource. Its ability to grow in a variety of climatic and soil conditions and minimal requirements of agronomical inputs than other oilseed crops makes it economically viable for advanced biofuel production. We designed a study to investigate the effect of paclobutrazol [2RS, 3RS)-1-(4-Chlorophenyl)-4,4-dimethyl-2-(1H-1,2,4-triazol-1-yl)pentan-3-ol] (PBZ), a popular plant growth regulator, on the seed and oil yield of <it>Camelina sativa </it>(cv. Celine).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A field-based micro-trial setup was established in a randomized block design and the study was performed twice within a span of five months (October 2010 to February 2011) and five different PBZ treatments (Control: T₀; 25 mg l^-1: T₁; 50 mg l^-1: T₂; 75 mg l^-1: T₃; 100 mg l^-1: T₄; 125 mg l^-1: T₅) were applied (soil application) at the time of initiation of flowering. PBZ at 100 mg l^-1concentration (T₄) resulted in highest seed and oil yield by 80% and 15%, respectively. The seed yield increment was mainly due to enhanced number of siliques per plant when compared to control. The PBZ - treated plants displayed better photosynthetic leaf gas exchange characteristics, higher chlorophyll contents and possessed dark green leaves which were photosynthetically active for a longer period and facilitated higher photoassimilation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We report for the first time that application of optimized PBZ dose can be a potential strategy to achieve higher seed and oil yield from <it>Camelina sativa </it>that holds great promise as a biofuel crop in future.</p

Parsimonious use of indicators for evaluating sustainability systems with multivariate statistical analyses

Indicators are commonly used for evaluating relative sustainability for competing products and processes. When a set of indicators is chosen for a particular system of study, it is important to ensure that they vary independently of each other. Often, the number of indicators characterizing a chosen system may be large. It is essential to select the most important indicators from a large set so that a dependable bias-free analysis can be done using the reduced set of indicators. In this paper, we propose the use of principal component analysis (PCA) along with the partial least square-variable importance in projection (PLS-VIP) method to ensure that the explicit or tacit assumption of the independence of the chosen indicators is valid. We have used two case studies to demonstrate successful use of these two methods for parsimonious use of indicators for sustainability analysis of systems