Production of α-amylase from Streptomyces sp. SLBA-08 strain using agro-industrial by-products

Approximately 1.5 trillion tons are the estimated yearly biomass production, making it an essentially unlimited source of raw material for environmentally friendly and biocompatible products transformed by microorganism, specially fungi and actinomycetes. Several lignocellulosic residues, such as sisal waste and sugarcane bagasse contain starch in their structures which could become important sources for the production of amylases. This study evaluated the production of amylolytic enzymes using Streptomyces sp. SLBA-08 strain, isolated from a semi-arid soil, according to their ability to grow on soluble starch as the sole carbon source. The effect of the carbon source (sisal waste and sugarcane bagasse) on α-amylase production was studied using submerged cultivations at 30 ºC. The highest level of α-amylase activity corresponded to 10.1 U. mL-1 and was obtained using sisal waste (2.7%) and urea (0.8%) in submerged fermentation after 3 days of cultivation. The partial characterization showed the best α-amylase activity at 50ºC and pH 7.0. These results are of great importance for the use of sisal waste as a substrate for biotechnological proposes

Planck 2013 results. XVII. Gravitational lensing by large-scale structure

On the arcminute angular scales probed by Planck, the CMB anisotropies are gently perturbed by gravitational lensing. Here we present a detailed study of this effect, detecting lensing independently in the 100, 143, and 217GHz frequency bands with an overall significance of greater than 25sigma. We use the temperature-gradient correlations induced by lensing to reconstruct a (noisy) map of the CMB lensing potential, which provides an integrated measure of the mass distribution back to the CMB last-scattering surface. Our lensing potential map is significantly correlated with other tracers of mass, a fact which we demonstrate using several representative tracers of large-scale structure. We estimate the power spectrum of the lensing potential, finding generally good agreement with expectations from the best-fitting LCDM model for the Planck temperature power spectrum, showing that this measurement at z=1100 correctly predicts the properties of the lower-redshift, later-time structures which source the lensing potential. When combined with the temperature power spectrum, our measurement provides degeneracy-breaking power for parameter constraints; it improves CMB-alone constraints on curvature by a factor of two and also partly breaks the degeneracy between the amplitude of the primordial perturbation power spectrum and the optical depth to reionization, allowing a measurement of the optical depth to reionization which is independent of large-scale polarization data. Discarding scale information, our measurement corresponds to a 4% constraint on the amplitude of the lensing potential power spectrum, or a 2% constraint on the RMS amplitude of matter fluctuations at z~2

Planck 2013 results. XII. Component separation

Planck has produced detailed all-sky observations over nine frequency bands between 30 and 857 GHz. These observations allow robust reconstruction of the primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations over nearly the full sky, as well as new constraints on Galactic foregrounds. This paper describes the component separation framework adopted by Planck. We test four foreground-cleaned CMB maps derived using qualitatively different component separation algorithms. The quality of our reconstructions is evaluated through detailed simulations and internal comparisons, and shown through various tests to be internally consistent and robust for CMB power spectrum and cosmological parameter estimation up to l = 2000. The parameter constraints on LambdaCDM cosmologies derived from these maps are consistent with those presented in the cross-spectrum based Planck likelihood analysis. We choose two of the CMB maps for specific scientific goals. We also present maps and frequency spectra of the Galactic low-frequency, CO, and thermal dust emission. The component maps are found to provide a faithful representation of the sky, as evaluated by simulations. For the low-frequency component, the spectral index varies widely over the sky, ranging from about beta = -4 to -2. Considering both morphology and prior knowledge of the low frequency components, the index map allows us to associate a steep spectral index (beta < -3.2) with strong anomalous microwave emission, corresponding to a spinning dust spectrum peaking below 20 GHz, a flat index of beta > -2.3 with strong free-free emission, and intermediate values with synchrotron emission

Planck 2013 results. I. Overview of products and scientific results

The ESA's Planck satellite, dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched 14 May 2009 and has been scanning the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously since 12 August 2009. This paper gives an overview of the mission and its performance, the processing, analysis, and characteristics of the data, the scientific results, and the science data products and papers in the release. The science products include maps of the CMB and diffuse extragalactic foregrounds, a catalogue of compact Galactic and extragalactic sources, and a list of sources detected through the SZ effect. The likelihood code used to assess cosmological models against the Planck data and a lensing likelihood are described. Scientific results include robust support for the standard six-parameter LCDM model of cosmology and improved measurements of its parameters, including a highly significant deviation from scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum. The Planck values for these parameters and others derived from them are significantly different from those previously determined. Several large-scale anomalies in the temperature distribution of the CMB, first detected by WMAP, are confirmed with higher confidence. Planck sets new limits on the number and mass of neutrinos, and has measured gravitational lensing of CMB anisotropies at greater than 25 sigma. Planck finds no evidence for non-Gaussianity in the CMB. Planck's results agree well with results from the measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations. Planck finds a lower Hubble constant than found in some more local measures. Some tension is also present between the amplitude of matter fluctuations derived from CMB data and that derived from SZ data. The Planck and WMAP power spectra are offset from each other by an average level of about 2% around the first acoustic peak