Biosafety education relevant to genetically engineered crops for academic and non-academic stakeholders in East Africa

Development and deployment of genetically engineered crops requires effective environmental and food safety assessment capacity. In-country expertise is needed to make locally appropriate decisions. In April 2007, biosafety and biotechnology scientists, regulators, educators, and communicators from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, met to examine the status and needs of biosafety training and educational programs in East Africa. Workshop participants emphasized the importance of developing biosafety capacity within their countries and regionally. Key recommendations included identification of key biosafety curricular components for university students; collaboration among institutions and countries; development of informational materials for non-academic stakeholders and media; and organization of study tours for decision makers. It was emphasized that biosafety knowledge is important for all aspects of environmental health, food safety, and human and animal hygiene. Thus, development of biosafety expertise, policies and procedures can be a stepping stone to facilitate improved biosafety for all aspects of society and the environment.

Performance of biofilm carriers in anaerobic digestion of sisal leaf waste leachate

Three methanogenic biofilm bioreactors were studied to evaluate the performance of three types of carriers. The carrier material were consisted of sisal fibre waste, pumice stone and porous glass beads, and the bioprocess evaluated was the methanogenesis anaerobic digestion of sisal leaf waste leachate. Process performance was investigated by increasing the organic loading rate (OLR) step-wise. The best results were obtained from the bioreactor packed with sisal fibre waste. It had the highest chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal efficiencies in the range of 80-93 percent at OLRs in the range of 2.4-25 g COD L-1d-1. The degradation pattern of volatile fatty acids (VFAs) showed that the degradation of propionate was limiting at higher OLRs. The stable pH and higher partial alkalinity (PA) of the outflow illustrated that packed-bed bioreactors have a good ability to withstand the variations in load and volatile fatty acid concentrations that can occur in a two-stage anaerobic process. In conclusion, sisal fibre waste was shown to be a novel promising biofilm carrier and would work very well in methanogenic biofilm bioreactors treating sisal leaf tissue waste leachate. Furthermore both sisal wastes are available in the neighbourhood of sisal industries, which makes anaerobic digestion scale up at sisal factory level feasible and cost-effective.