The microbial component of healthy seeds - the seed microbiome - appears to be inherited between plant generations and can dynamically influence germination, plant performance, and survival. As such, methods to optimize the seed microbiomes of major crops could have far-reaching implications for plant breeding and crop improvement to enhance agricultural food, feed, and fiber production. Here, ...

Phytoextraction is a remediation technology that uses plants to remove heavy metals from soil. The success of a phytoextraction process depends on adequate plant yield (aerial parts) and high metal concentrations in plant shoots. A pot experiment was conducted to investigate the combination effects of plants [sunflower (Helianthus annuus) and canola (Brassica napus)] with soil treatments (manur...

The challenge of managing agroecosystems on a landscape scale and the novel structure of soil communities in agroecosystems both provide reason to focus on in-field management practices, including cover crop adoption, reduced tillage, and judicial pesticide use, to promote soil community diversity. Belowground and epigeal arthropods, especially exotic generalist predators, play a significant ro...

Pseudomonas syringae is a bacterial plant pathogen that can lead to heavy losses in crop production. Th is bacteria is a very good model to study the infection processes, as it can cause disease in Arabidopsis thaliana, a well-studied plant model. Th is text presents an overview of the bacterial pathogenesis from a molecular biology perspective, and explains the role of plant responses in stopp...

This paper describes an event-based approach to the design and implementation of a supervisory system applied to a biotechnological process. An heuristic model of the process under supervision is characterised as a discreteevent system (DES). Plant events generate transitions on the DES model, thus reflecting the dynamics of the continuous system underneath. This approach is applied to a yeast ...

The bubble effectiveness in liquid phase cylohexane non-catalytic oxidation process is discussed in this paper. Then the bubble effectiveness and a new proposed kinetic model are used in the mathematical model of the industrial reactor for the cyclohexane non-catalytic oxidation process. Furthermore, simulation and optimization based on this reactor model are carried out. The results of sim...

The Design Change Notice (DCN) process at Volvo Powertrain Skövde Plant is an administrative process with the purpose of introducing design changes in the production of diesel engines. The process is dependent on actions from several external stakeholders, to Skövde Plant, and the process must coordinate its activities with respect to subcontractors, purchasing functions, different development ...

We present an effective scheduling heuristic for realistic production planning in a petrochemical blending plant. The considered model takes into account orders spanning a multi-product portfolio with multiple bills of materials per product, that need to be scheduled on shared production facilities including a complex pipeline network. Capacity constraints, intermediate storage restrictions, du...