EPIC (S-ethyl dipropylthiocarbamate) is a selective herbicide
which controls some annual grasses, annual broadleaves, and perennial
grasses when incorporated into the soil before planting. In the last
few years, reports have been received of certain fields in the
Willamette Valley of Oregon in which EPIC was no longer effective.
Preliminary...
Knowledge of a compound's degradation pathway is crucial to the assessment of risk at contaminated sites. Pentachlorophenol and its metabolic products can serve as model compounds to study the fate and transport of halogenated aromatic compounds in the environment. Acclimation of anaerobic sewage sludge to pentachlorophenol produced a microbial consortium...
Chlorinated phenols are toxic compounds and often released into natural
environments from improper disposal or non-point sources. One important factor in
assessing the environmental fate and transport is the rates of microbial degradation in
soils and natural waters. In this study, eight chlorophenols (4-chlorophenol (4-CP),
2,4-dichlorophenol (2,4-DCP), 3,4-dichlorophenol (3,4-DCP), 3,5-dichlorophenol...
A number of bacterial species are capable of degrading the widespread environmental pollutant trichloroethylene (TCE) via aerobic cometabolism, but cytotoxic effects that can debilitate the microorganism often accompany this transformation. In this dissertation the effects of TCE degradation on the well-studied, toluene-oxidizing bacterium Burkholderia cepacia G4 were investigated at the...
The research described in this thesis was aimed at understanding how particle size, porosity, and enzyme accessible surface area influence the rate of saccharification of microcrystalline cellulose. Microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) is a commonly used substrate for the study of cellulolytic enzymes. MCC preparations of different particle size are commercially available....
Cometabolic biodegradation processes, important for bioremediation of hazardous waste sites, are not well understood and have not been modeled thoroughly. Toxic effects and bacterial responses to toxicity may change intracellular enzyme levels, rendering traditional enzyme kinetics models inappropriate. This document presents a novel cometabolic enzyme kinetics model that incorporates enzyme...