Effects of Exogenous Nutrient Additions on Azodye Wastewater Treatment

Since the azo dyes widely used in textile-dyeing industry are toxic, highly persistent, and ubiquitously distributed in the environment, their treatment efficiencies and fade in ecosystems have received worldwide attention. Due to the microbes play important roles in azo-dye degradation, exogenous nutrient addition is used as a promising biostimulation strategy to improve the treatment efficiencies of azo-dye wastewater. However, little is known about the effects of different kinds of exogenous nutrients on the azo-dye wastewater treatment directly. Here, three kinds of common nutrients, glucose, starch and yeast extract, were added to the sequencing batch reactors （SBR） for the treatment of wastewater containing acid red 73 to compare the biostimulation efficiencies by investigating the dye＇s removal efficiencies and the changes of related water qualities. Our results showed that the reactors added yeast extract had highest removal efficiencies and chemical oxygen demand （COD） as well, followed by glucose and starch. The removal rates of acid red 73 and COD were 90.63% and 8713% in the reactors added yeast extract, respectively, while 86.49% and 78.4% in those with glucose and 85.38% and 75.2% in those with starch. This study provided some useful information for the biostimulation strategy of azo-dye wastewater treatment and preliminarily suggested that yeast extract would be the optimal choice.

In vitro and in vivo efficacy of Molnupiravir against Zika virus infections

Dear Editor,Zika virus(ZIKV)is a mosquito-borne,positive-stranded RNA virus first identified in 1947 in monkeys and later identified in humans in 1952(Faye et al.,2014).It is among the“TORCH”group of microorganisms and causes outbreaks in several countries and regions since 2007(Voordouw et al.,2019).

Modified pretreatment method for total microbial DNA extraction from contaminated river sediment

Extraction of high-quality microbial DNA from contaminated environmental samples is an essential step in microbial ecological study. Based on previously published methods for soil and sediment samples, a modified pretreatrnent method was developed for extracting microbial DNA from heavily contaminated river sediment samples via selection of optimal pretreatment parameters （i.e., reagent solution, reaction duration, and temperature）. The pretreatment procedure involves wash ing the river sediment sample for three times with a solution containing 0.1 mol.L-1 ethylene diamine tetra- acetic acid （EDTA）, 0.1 mol- L-1 Tris （pH 8.0）, 1.5 mol. L1 NaC1, 0.1 mol. L-1 NaH2PO4, and Na2HPO4 at 65~C with 180r.min-1 for 15min to remove humic materials and heavy metals prior to the employment of standard DNA extraction procedures. We compared the results of standard procedure DNA extraction following pretreatrnent, without pretreatment, and with using a commercial PowerSoilTM DNA Isolation Kit. The results indicated that the pretreatment significantly improved the DNA quality based on DNA yield, DNA fragment length, and determination of prokaryotic diversity. Prokaryotic diversity exhibited in the DNA with the pretreatment was also considerably higher than that extracted with the Power- SoilTM DNA Isolation Kit only. The pretreatment method worked well even with a small amount of sediment sample （0.25 g or even lower）. The method provides a novel, simple, cost-effective tool for DNA extraction for microbial community analysis in environmental monitoring and remediation processes.