Alternative Use of a Compressed Component of a Digestate from Agricultural BGSs （Biogas Stations）

The paper presents the results of a two-year research of properties and the way of use of briquettes and pellets made of separated and partially dehydrated digestate from agricultural BGSs （biogas stations）. Digestate is a by-product of BGS. There are approximately 170 agricultural BGSs operating in the Czech Republic. Unprocessed digestate with the dry mass content around 6% is usually applied to soil as a lighter mineral fertilizer. If digestate is separated and the separated solid component of the digestate is further dehydrated to 14 % moisture, it can be processed by pressing to the form of very solid pellets and briquettes, also with various additives. It was also ascertained that mechanical strength and shape of briquettes does not change due to long-term storage. In this form, the compressed digestate can be used in various ways. One of the ways is its energetic use by direct burning. That is why we have observed its calorific value and combustion heat. Another alternative use of compressed digestate from BGS is its application in targeted treatment of in particular mechanical properties of soil and its water regime. The briquettes and pellets have great water sorption properties--the briquette retains water and as a consequence grows up to four times in size. This specific property was analysed and it was ascertained that the speed of water sorption depends on the composition of the compressed mixture （i.e., the type of material and the size of its particles）, but also on the total weight of the produced briquettes （i.e., their size）. Similar dependency was ascertained for other briquette materials that were analysed.

A compressed variance component mixed model for detecting QTNs and QTN-by-environment and QTN-by-QTN interactions in genome-wide association studies

Although genome-wide association studies are widely used to mine genes for quantitative traits,the effects to be estimated are confounded,and the methodologies for detecting interactions are imperfect.To address these issues,the mixed model proposed here first estimates the genotypic effects for AA,Aa,and aa,and the genotypic polygenic background replaces additive and dominance polygenic backgrounds.Then,the estimated genotypic effects are partitioned into additive and dominance effects using a one-way analysis of variance model.This strategy was further expanded to cover QTN-by-environment interactions(QEIs)and QTN-by-QTN interactions(QQIs)using the same mixed-model framework.Thus,a three-variance-component mixed model was integrated with our multi-locus random-SNP-effect mixed linear model(mrMLM)method to establish a new methodological framework,3VmrMLM,that detects all types of loci and estimates their effects.In Monte Carlo studies,3VmrMLM correctly detected all types of loci and almost unbiasedly estimated their effects,with high powers and accuracies and a low false positive rate.In re-analyses of 10 traits in 1439 rice hybrids,detection of 269 known genes,45 known gene-by-environment interactions,and 20 known gene-by-gene interactions strongly validated 3VmrMLM.Further analyses of known genes showed more small(67.49%),minor-allele-frequency(35.52%),and pleiotropic(30.54%)genes,with higher repeatability across datasets(54.36%)and more dominance loci.In addition,a heteroscedasticity mixed model in multiple environments and dimension reduction methods in quite a number of environments were developed to detect QEIs,and variable selection under a polygenic background was proposed for QQI detection.This study provides a new approach for revealing the genetic architecture of quantitative traits.