Strategies to increase nitrogen use efficiency and reduce nitrate leaching in vegetable production in the Netherlands

Environmental concern and legislation of fertilization requires strategies to increase nitrogen use efficiency and reduce nitrate leaching. Strategies can be fertilizer choice, timing of N availability and fertilizer placement. Rainfall in the experimental year 2007 was moderate and different strategies were therefore not seriously tested. However, for crops that allow regular fertilization, it is questionable whether special fertilizers can do better than calcium ammonium nitrate (CAN) when fertilizers are applied according to good practice (i.e., row application, side dressing and split applications). Specific application of small amounts of N near planted endive showed increased initial growth, even at high levels of soil mineral N, and was found to lead in one of two plantings to increased yield at harvest. Substitution of broadcast N before planting by a starter application close to the plants followed by side dressing maintains maximum production while leaching risk is reduced

The fate of nitrogen from crop residues of broccoli, leek and sugar beet

Environmental concern has lead to legislation on fertilization to reduce nutrient losses to the environment. Reducing N input may be inadequate for crops that have a high N content in their residues. Reducing N input will negatively affect yield, but the residues remain. Management of crop residues may then be a more effective strategy to reduce N losses, notably nitrate leaching. Two experiments were carried out in 2006-07 and 2007-08 to study all emission routes of N from crop residues of broccoli, leek and sugar beet, and to determine the contribution of N from the residues to nitrate in groundwater. Crop residues were surface applied or rototilled, and compared with a blank and application of fertilizer N. About 11 to 16% of the N-content was lost to the air. Total N-losses to the air as ammonia and through denitrification were little affected by tillage, but partitioning was. When residues were left on the soil surface, most N was lost as ammonia, when the residues were rototilled, most N was lost through denitrification. Year strongly affected N leaching from crop residues, and the fraction of N from crop residues that was leached was twice as high in 2006-07 than in 2007-08. Tillage increased N leaching from broccoli, but had little effect with leek or sugar beet. Between 20 and 60% of the N content of residues of leek and broccoli was leached. Removal of residues after harvest will therefore contribute to reduce N leaching. However, options for treatment and re-use of the residues need to be studied as well as the effects on nitrate leaching and gaseous losses to assess the effects of the system as a whol

Safety and Effectiveness of Struvite from Black Water and Urine as a Phosphorus Fertilizer

To ensure food supply, phosphorus must be recycled, for which an appealing method is using struvite fertilizer from human excreta. One struvite from black water and another from urine were assessed for safety under Dutch regulations, and for effectiveness as P fertilizer in a maize field experiment and a literature review. Both struvites contained 12% P, 12% Mg, 6% N, and 0.5-1.5% of several micronutrients. Struvites did not exceed Dutch regulations for heavy metals or pathogens, and based on literature, organic toxins should be far below regulatory limits. In this study and 18 others, struvite appears to have similar effectiveness to soluble fertilizer. Early in the season, 200 kg P2O5 ha-1 of black water struvite and soluble phosphorus improved maize performance (

Response prediction and evaluation using PET in patients with solid tumors treated with immunotherapy

Simple Summary In cancer treatment, immunotherapy is increasingly becoming important as a component of first-line treatment and has improved the prognosis of patients since its introduction. A large group of patients, however, do not respond to immunotherapy, and predicting a treatment response remains challenging. Furthermore, evaluating a response using conventional computed tomography (CT) scans is not straightforward due to the different mechanism of action of immunotherapy compared to chemotherapy. This review provides an overview of positron emission tomography (PET) in predicting and evaluating treatment response to immunotherapy. In multiple malignancies, checkpoint inhibitor therapy has an established role in the first-line treatment setting. However, only a subset of patients benefit from checkpoint inhibition, and as a result, the field of biomarker research is active. Molecular imaging with the use of positron emission tomography (PET) is one of the biomarkers that is being studied. PET tracers such as conventional F-18-FDG but also PD-(L)1 directed tracers are being evaluated for their predictive power. Furthermore, the use of artificial intelligence is under evaluation for the purpose of response prediction. Response evaluation during checkpoint inhibitor therapy can be challenging due to the different response patterns that can be observed compared to traditional chemotherapy. The additional information provided by PET can potentially be of value to evaluate a response early after the start of treatment and provide the clinician with important information about the efficacy of immunotherapy. Furthermore, the use of PET to stratify between patients with a complete response and those with a residual disease can potentially guide clinicians to identify patients for which immunotherapy can be discontinued and patients for whom the treatment needs to be escalated. This review provides an overview of the use of positron emission tomography (PET) to predict and evaluate treatment response to immunotherapy.Pathogenesis and treatment of chronic pulmonary disease

Nitrate in upper groundwater on farms under tillage as affected by fertilizer use, soil type and groundwater table

Indicators are needed to check whether policies on protection of groundwater are effective and if regulations are complied with. We evaluated various indicators at different scales, both in space and in time, and at different degrees of complexity. Groundwater was sampled on 34 arable farms for 3 years. Nitrate concentration in upper groundwater was low on clay soil. On sandy soil, peat layers reduced the nitrate concentration with about 80 mg/l on average. Sandy soils with high groundwater tables had nitrate concentrations that were less than half of those at sandy soils with low groundwater tables. The relationship between different fertilization variables and nitrate in groundwater was investigated for sandy soils without peat layers. N surplus poorly correlated with nitrate concentrations in groundwater when individual sampling points were studied, but clearly increased when data were averaged at the farm level. Soil mineral nitrogen correlated best with nitrate concentrations in groundwater. The relationships show that especially on well drained soil drastic measures will be inevitable to reach good water quality

Increased expression of the EZH2 polycomb group gene in BMI-1-positive neoplastic cells during bronchial carcinogenesis.

Polycomb group (PcG) genes are responsible for maintenance of cellular identity and contribute to regulation of the cell cycle. Recent studies have identified several PcG genes as oncogenes, and a role for PcG proteins in human oncogenesis is suspected. We investigated the expression of BMI-1 and EZH2 PcG oncogenes in human bronchial squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) and bronchial premalignant precursor lesions (PLs). Whereas normal bronchial epithelium was associated with widespread expression of BMI-1 in resting EZH2-negative cells, neoplastic cells in lung carcinomas displayed altered expression of both BMI-1 and EZH2. Two patterns of abnormal PcG expression were observed: increased expression of BMI-1 in dividing neoplastic cells of PLs and SCCs, and enhanced expression of EZH2 and Ki-67 in BMI-1-positive cells according to severity of the histopathologic stage. We propose that altered expression of BMI1 and EZH2 is an early event that precedes high rates of proliferation in lung cancer. Because PcG complexes are normally involved in the maintenance of cell characteristics, abnormal PcG expression may contribute to loss of cell identity

Electric Field Control of Shallow Donor Impurities in Silicon

We present a tight-binding study of donor impurities in Si, demonstrating the adequacy of this approach for this problem by comparison with effective mass theory and experimental results. We consider the response of the system to an applied electric field: donors near a barrier material and in the presence of an uniform electric field may undergo two different ionization regimes according to the distance of the impurity to the Si/barrier interface. We show that for impurities ~ 5 nm below the barrier, adiabatic ionization is possible within switching times of the order of one picosecond, while for impurities ~ 10 nm or more below the barrier, no adiabatic ionization may be carried out by an external uniform electric field. Our results are discussed in connection with proposed Si:P quantum computer architectures.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, submitted to PR