Energy and Nutrients' Recovery in Anaerobic Digestion of Agricultural Biomass: An Italian Perspective for Future Applications

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is the most adopted biotechnology for the valorization of agricultural biomass into valuable products like biogas and digestate, a renewable fertilizer. This paper illustrates in the first part the actual situation of the anaerobic digestion sector in Italy, including the number of plants, their geographical distribution, the installed power and the typical feedstock used. In the second part, a future perspective, independent of the actual incentive scheme, is presented. It emerged that Italy is the second European country for the number of anaerobic digestion plants with more than 1500 units for a total electricity production of about 1400 MWel. More than 60% of them are in the range of 200 kW-1 MW installed power. Almost 70% of the plants are located in the northern part of the Country where intensive agriculture and husbandry are applied. Most of the plants are now using energy crops in the feedstock. The future perspectives of the biogas sector in Italy will necessarily consider a shift from power generation to biomethane production, and an enlargement of the portfolio of possible feedstocks, the recovery of nutrients from digestate in a concentrated form, and the expansion of the AD sector to southern regions. Power to gas and biobased products will complete the future scenario

Integrating the selection of PHA storing biomass and nitrogen removal via nitrite for the treatment of the sludge reject water

Integrating the selection of PHA storing biomass and nitrogen removal via-nitrite for the treatment of the sludge reject wate

A role for TSPO in mitochondrial Ca2+ homeostasis and redox stress signaling

The 18 kDa translocator protein TSPO localizes on the outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM). Systematically overexpressed at sites of neuroinflammation it is adopted as a biomarker of brain conditions. TSPO inhibits the autophagic removal of mitochondria by limiting PARK2-mediated mitochondrial ubiquitination via a peri-organelle accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Here we describe that TSPO deregulates mitochondrial Ca2+ signaling leading to a parallel increase in the cytosolic Ca2+ pools that activate the Ca2+-dependent NADPH oxidase (NOX) thereby increasing ROS. The inhibition of mitochondrial Ca2+ uptake by TSPO is a consequence of the phosphorylation of the voltage-dependent anion channel (VDAC1) by the protein kinase A (PKA), which is recruited to the mitochondria, in complex with the Acyl-CoA binding domain containing 3 (ACBD3). Notably, the neurotransmitter glutamate, which contributes neuronal toxicity in age-dependent conditions, triggers this TSPO-dependent mechanism of cell signaling leading to cellular demise. TSPO is therefore proposed as a novel OMM-based pathway to control intracellular Ca2+ dynamics and redox transients in neuronal cytotoxicity

Extracting Scattering Phase-Shifts in Higher Partial-Waves from Lattice QCD Calculations

L\"uscher's method is routinely used to determine meson-meson, meson-baryon and baryon-baryon s-wave scattering amplitudes below inelastic thresholds from Lattice QCD calculations - presently at unphysical light-quark masses. In this work we review the formalism and develop the requisite expressions to extract phase-shifts describing meson-meson scattering in partial-waves with angular-momentum l<=6 and l=9. The implications of the underlying cubic symmetry, and strategies for extracting the phase-shifts from Lattice QCD calculations, are presented, along with a discussion of the signal-to-noise problem that afflicts the higher partial-waves.Comment: 79 pages, 41 figure

Standard-model prediction for direct CP violation in K→ππK\to\pi\pi decay

We report the first lattice QCD calculation of the complex kaon decay amplitude $A_0$ with physical kinematics, using a $32^3\times 64$ lattice volume and a single lattice spacing $a$, with $1/a= 1.3784(68)$ GeV. We find Re$(A_0) = 4.66(1.00)(1.26) \times 10^{-7}$ GeV and Im$(A_0) = -1.90(1.23)(1.08) \times 10^{-11}$ GeV, where the first error is statistical and the second systematic. The first value is in approximate agreement with the experimental result: Re$(A_0) = 3.3201(18) \times 10^{-7}$ GeV while the second can be used to compute the direct CP violating ratio Re$(\varepsilon'/\varepsilon)=1.38(5.15)(4.59)\times 10^{-4}$, which is $2.1\sigma$ below the experimental value $16.6(2.3)\times 10^{-4}$. The real part of $A_0$ is CP conserving and serves as a test of our method while the result for Re$(\varepsilon'/\varepsilon)$ provides a new test of the standard-model theory of CP violation, one which can be made more accurate with increasing computer capability.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. Updated to match published versio

Domain wall QCD with physical quark masses

We present results for several light hadronic quantities ($f_\pi$, $f_K$, $B_K$, $m_{ud}$, $m_s$, $t_0^{1/2}$, $w_0$) obtained from simulations of 2+1 flavor domain wall lattice QCD with large physical volumes and nearly-physical pion masses at two lattice spacings. We perform a short, O(3)%, extrapolation in pion mass to the physical values by combining our new data in a simultaneous chiral/continuum `global fit' with a number of other ensembles with heavier pion masses. We use the physical values of $m_\pi$, $m_K$ and $m_\Omega$ to determine the two quark masses and the scale - all other quantities are outputs from our simulations. We obtain results with sub-percent statistical errors and negligible chiral and finite-volume systematics for these light hadronic quantities, including: $f_\pi$ = 130.2(9) MeV; $f_K$ = 155.5(8) MeV; the average up/down quark mass and strange quark mass in the $\bar {\rm MS}$ scheme at 3 GeV, 2.997(49) and 81.64(1.17) MeV respectively; and the neutral kaon mixing parameter, $B_K$, in the RGI scheme, 0.750(15) and the $\bar{\rm MS}$ scheme at 3 GeV, 0.530(11).Comment: 131 pages, 30 figures. Updated to match published versio

Development of a Novel Process Integrating the Treatment of Sludge Reject Water and the Production of Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs)

The Supporting Information is available free of charge on the ACS Publications website at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5b01776This study was carried out within the framework of the European projects LIVE WASTE (LIFE 12 ENV/CY/000544)