Comparison of chlorine and chlorine dioxide as disinfectants for surface waters

Safe supplies of drinking water free of pathogenic agents such as viruses and protozoa are essential for humankind. The evaluation of current treatment practices for the removal of pathogens has become increasingly important with the occurrence of waterborne disease outbreaks. Shortcomings associated with chlorine have prompted the need to assess alternative disinfectants. The overall objective of this research is to compare chlorine and chlorine dioxide as disinfectants for surface waters using Giardia muris cysts, bacteriophage MS2, total and fecal coliforms, and heterotrophic bacteria. Concentration x time (CT) values for the inactivation of Giardia muris cysts and MS2 bacteriophage as a function of pH and temperature by chlorine and chlorine dioxide at the bench and pilot scale are established. Results indicate that chlorine dioxide is more effective against G. muris and MS2 than chlorine at the bench scale. Chlorine dioxide is more virucidal at pH 9.0 than at 6.0 and 7.0 and chlorine at all pH values tested. Chlorine, however, is more virucidal at pH 6.0 than at higher pH values. For both disinfectants, G. muris log reductions are not significantly different among any of the pH values tested. The effect of temperature on inactivation rates at the bench scale was inconclusive. Pilot studies indicate chlorine dioxide is not as effective as chlorine in inactivating G. muris and MS2. However, the variation and small number of data points limits the statistical power of analysis of pilot results. Differences between bench and pilot scale studies for the log reduction of both organisms by chlorine and chlorine dioxide are observed. Results indicate that G. muris cysts are approximately 30 times more resistant than MS2 to chlorine and 45 times more resistant to chlorine dioxide. Low levels of turbidity, total and fecal coliforms, and heterotrophic bacteria do not affect the disinfectants\u27 ability to inactivate G. muris and MS2. Results of this study indicate that chlorine dioxide exhibits strong disinfecting capabilities. It should be considered as a viable alternative to chlorine

Contextual classification of multispectral image data

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Addition of Fat to Diets of Lactating Sows. I. Effects on Sow and Pig Performance

Sow energy intake during lactation is an important factor to consider when trying to maximize sow and pig performance. It has been shown that inadequate energy intake during lactation results in decreased litter weaning weight. Poor energy intake during lactation is also thought to result in a reduction in postweaning reproductive performance by extending the period from weaning to rebreeding. This reduction in postweaning performance is typically preceded by the excessive loss of weight and backfat during lactation. One method that has been used to increase sow energy intake, and thus alleviate the problems described above is to add dietary fat. The addition of high concentrations of fat (e.g., 7.5 to 15% of the diet) has been shown to result in increased sow energy intake during lactation, and if consumed for approximately one week before farrowing, increased survival rates for pigs with light birthweights. This article reports the effects of high fat diets on sow lactation performance, litter performance, and sow feed and energy intake. A subsequent article will discuss the effects of added dietary fat on energy intake, meal patterns, and blood hormones and metabolites. A specific objective of this research was to determine the effects of dietary fat on milk production and composition

The Effects of Tallow Addition to the Diets of Lactating Sows on Hormone and Metabolite Concentrations

The metabolic responses of sows fed a corn-soybean meal or a corn-soybean meal-10% tallow diet were measured. The addition of tallow to lactating sows diets had no effect on feed or energy intake. In addition, there were no effects on the concentrations of glucose, non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA), insulin, or glucagon. No differences in either the time spent consuming feed or the number of meals consumed were observed. Finally, no linear association between eating time and area under the curve for insulin was observed for sows consuming either diet. These results show the addition of tallow to lactation diets does not affect the concentrations of glucose, NEFA, insulin or glucagon in the fed state

Comprehensive analysis of the mouse renal cortex using two-dimensional HPLC – tandem mass spectrometry

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Proteomic methodologies increasingly have been applied to the kidney to map the renal cortical proteome and to identify global changes in renal proteins induced by diseases such as diabetes. While progress has been made in establishing a renal cortical proteome using 1-D or 2-DE and mass spectrometry, the number of proteins definitively identified by mass spectrometry has remained surprisingly small. Low coverage of the renal cortical proteome as well as our interest in diabetes-induced changes in proteins found in the renal cortex prompted us to perform an in-depth proteomic analysis of mouse renal cortical tissue.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We report a large scale analysis of mouse renal cortical proteome using SCX prefractionation strategy combined with HPLC – tandem mass spectrometry. High-confidence identification of ~2,000 proteins, including cytoplasmic, nuclear, plasma membrane, extracellular and unknown/unclassified proteins, was obtained by separating tryptic peptides of renal cortical proteins into 60 fractions by SCX prior to LC-MS/MS. The identified proteins represented the renal cortical proteome with no discernible bias due to protein physicochemical properties, subcellular distribution, biological processes, or molecular function. The highest ranked molecular functions were characteristic of tubular epithelium, and included binding, catalytic activity, transporter activity, structural molecule activity, and carrier activity. Comparison of this renal cortical proteome with published human urinary proteomes demonstrated enrichment of renal extracellular, plasma membrane, and lysosomal proteins in the urine, with a lack of intracellular proteins. Comparison of the most abundant proteins based on normalized spectral abundance factor (NSAF) in this dataset versus a published glomerular proteome indicated enrichment of mitochondrial proteins in the former and cytoskeletal proteins in the latter.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A whole tissue extract of the mouse kidney cortex was analyzed by an unbiased proteomic approach, yielding a dataset of ~2,000 unique proteins identified with strict criteria to ensure a high level of confidence in protein identification. As a result of extracting all proteins from the renal cortex, we identified an exceptionally wide range of renal proteins in terms of pI, MW, hydrophobicity, abundance, and subcellular location. Many of these proteins, such as low-abundance proteins, membrane proteins and proteins with extreme values in pI or MW are traditionally under-represented in 2-DE-based proteomic analysis.</p

Finding compound structures in images using image segmentation and graph-based knowledge discovery

We present an unsupervised method for discovering compound image structures that are comprised of simpler primitive objects. An initial segmentation step produces image regions with homogeneous spectral content. Then, the segmentation is translated into a relational graph structure whose nodes correspond to the regions and the edges represent the relationships between these regions. We assume that the region objects that appear together frequently can be considered as strongly related. This relation is modeled using the transition frequencies between neighboring regions, and the significant relations are found as the modes of a probability distribution estimated using the features of these transitions. Experiments using an Ikonos image show that subgraphs found within the graph representing the whole image correspond to parts of different high-level compound structures. ©2009 IEEE

Guest editorial: Foreword to the special issue on pattern recognition in remote sensing

[No abstract available