Utilization of lignocellulosic materials for the production of value-added chemicals or biofuels generally requires a pretreatment process to overcome the recalcitrance of the plant biomass for further enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation stages. Two of the most employed pretreatment processes are the ones that used dilute acid (DA) and alkaline (AL) catalyst providing specific effects on the ...

In the first study dry matter (DM), organic matter, crude protein (CP), neutral detergent fibre (NDF) and soluble carbohydrate (SC) concentrations were determined in whole leaves and the upper and lower sections of whole leaves of the Agave salmiana (Otto ex. Salm-Dyck) plant. The pH and saponin concentration were measured in aqueous extracts from these leaves. The leaves were collected from pl...

F or more than 100 years, the Baylor Health Care System in Dallas, Tex, has been committed to serving the community through quality, safe patient care. Throughout this century of healing, the contributions of surgery and surgeons have been invaluable to the Baylor Health Care System. As we enter the next century, we will continue to see remarkable advances in the area of surgery, advances that ...

Chemistry in the service of medical practice was relegated to the periphery of medical science until well into the nineteenth century. Biochemistry took shape near the close of the nineteenth century, when emphasis on living systems shifted from physiology to chemistry. The subsequent emergence of clinical chemistry in the opening years of the twentieth century, as the medical application of an...

The paper starts with a brief review of some criticisms of the Peer Review system – labelled ex-ante topdown PR system – for the evaluation of academic works. The critiques are grouped into efficiency and effectiveness criteria. It then goes on to analyse the roles of Peer Review and how good the system is at fulfilling those roles. The paper then proposes an alternative system for evaluation o...

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This essay represents a first attempt to make sense of the mass of early modern English publications that deal with or refer to mathematics, using a bibliometric approach made possible by the new electronic databases: Early English books online and Eighteenth-century collections online. I present statistical information about references to mathematics in this corpus of books, perform some stati...

Agro-waste materials such as oats straw (OS) and agave baggasse (AB) have functional groups which are able to bind metal ions. The agro-waste materials studied in this research (acid washed) were chemically characterized and their chromium sorption and desorption capacity was obtained. HNO3, NaOH and EDTA (at different concentrations and temperatures) were used to regenerate partially saturated...

Plants form symbiotic associations with endophytic bacteria within tissues of leaves, stems, and roots. It is unclear whether or how plants obtain nitrogen from these endophytic bacteria. Here we present evidence showing nitrogen flow from endophytic bacteria to plants in a process that appears to involve oxidative degradation of bacteria. In our experiments we employed Agave tequilana and its ...

BACKGROUND Agave species can grow well in semi-arid marginal agricultural lands around the world. Selected Agave species are used largely for alcoholic beverage production in Mexico. There are expanding research efforts to use the plentiful residues (bagasse) for ethanol production as the beverage manufacturing process only uses the juice from the central core of mature plants. Here, we investi...