Degradation of crude oil and pure hydrocarbon fractions by some wild bacterial and fungal species

The use of biodegradation as a method for cleaning up soil that has been contaminated by spilt petroleum can be an effective strategy. So, this study investigated the existence of the wild microorganism in soil contaminated with oil and study their ability to degrade petroleum in vitro. Nineteen samples were collected from various locations near Taq Taq (TTOPCO) natural seeps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Morphological, cultural, biochemical tests and molecular identification were used to identify the microbial communities, in addition, spore texture and the colour of the fungal isolates were investigated on the fungal isolates. Out of the19 samples, 17 indigenous bacterial strains and 5 fungal strains were successfully isolated. From the absorption spectrophotometry, Bacillus anthracis, Bacillus cereus, Achromobacter sp. and Pseudomonas aeruginosa for the bacterial isolates grew well on a minimal salt medium supplemented with 1% crude oil. Results showed that these isolates mentioned above had a strong ability to degrade crude oil by reducing the colour of 2,6-dichlorophenol indophenol (DCPIP) from deep blue to colourless. However, for the fractions of hydrocarbon, the bacterial isolates failed and did not affect the colour of any of the fractions. The results for fungi showed that Aspergillus lentulus and Rhizopus arrhizus had a strong ability to degrade both crude oil and fraction F1 by reducing the colour of DCPIP. Each fungal isolates also had a great tolerance to different concentrations of crude oil when grown on solid MSM. This study showed these microorganisms have a strong ability to degrade crude oil and can be used to clean up soil and the environment

Collaborative VLC/IROW Systems

Dimming is an important feature of an indoor lighting system where the illumination level can be controlled by the user. Therefore, integrating a visible light communication (VLC) system with an illumination system poses some challenges. One of the main issues is that the light unit should be “ON” all the time to ensure continuous communication. To ensure acceptance and adoption of VLC systems, an important issue should be addressed: how to communicate when the lights are “OFF” or partially dimmed. In this chapter, we propose five new infrared optical wireless (IROW) systems to support VLC systems when the light is totally turned off or significantly dimmed. To take advantage of both VLC and IROW, we introduce and implement the concept of a collaborative VLC/IROW system. In addition, we investigate the impact of partial dimming on the VLC system’s performance, and we propose an adaptive rate technique (ART) to mitigate the impact of light dimming. Moreover, in the case of no dimming, the VLC and IROW systems can collaborate to increase the data rate so it is higher than that in the pure VLC system. We have achieved 10 Gbps in an indoor environment, which is a 2× increase in the data rate compared with a pure VLC system

Production of a Laccase from Botrytis cinerea (DSMZ 877) and Application for Textile Phenolic Dye Decolorization

AbstractIn this study, the production, partial purification and characterization of a laccase from Botrytis cinerea strain (DSMZ No. 877) was studied. The production of laccase was induced using copper sulphate and Gallic acid as inducers. The maximum laccase activity observed during B. cinerea growth in the presence of 0.1% Gallic acid was 2600 UL−1. Laccase purification was performed by precipitated the enzyme with 90% ammonium sulphate followed by gel filtration chromatography. The optimum pH for the laccase activity was observed at acidic pH values (close to pH 3.5 - 4.6), while the optimum temperature was 70°C. The ability of the produced laccase as well as the laccase from T. versicolor to catalyse the decolorization of a phenolic dye (phenol red) was also investigated using natural and synthetic mediators. The higher decolorization activity was observed with 1–hydroxybenzotriazole (HBT) as mediator at pH 4.5 and temperature 30° C

Multi-Scale Colour Completed Local Binary Patterns for Scene and Event Sport Image Categorisation

The Local Binary Pattern (LBP) texture descriptor and some of its variant descriptors have been successfully used for texture classification and for a few other tasks such as face recognition, facial expression, and texture segmentation. However, these descriptors have been barely used for image categorisation because their calculations are based on the gray image and they are only invariant to monotonic light variations on the gray level. These descriptors ignore colour information despite their key role in distinguishing the objects and the natural scenes. In this paper, we enhance the Completed Local Binary Pattern (CLBP), an LBP variant with an impressive performance on texture classification. We propose five multiscale colour CLBP (CCLBP) descriptors by incorporating five different colour information into the original CLBP. By using the Oliva and Torralba (OT8) and Event sport datasets, our results attest to the superiority of the proposed CCLBP descriptors over the original CLBP in terms of image categorisation