ABSTRACT
Rivers are the lifeline of every living being, be it humans or animals. Clean water is essential for everyone. However, increased urbanization and rapid industrialization have led to rising pollution level in rivers. COVID-19 on the contrary has changed the entire ecosystem. Limited industrial activities, reduced people movement during COVID times has led to improvement in environment, be it atmosphere or hydrosphere. Present work aims to study the impact of COVID-19 on water quality index of river Yamuna as it traverses from Himalayan segment to Upper segment. Five sites are chosen between a stretch of 60+ km, and samples are collected during monsoon and post-monsoon seasons. Physico-chemical parameters (pH, Turbidity, Sulphate, Phosphate, Fluoride, Chloride, Total Hardness, Calcium, Magnesium, Dissolved Oxygen, BOD, COD, Alkalinity), water quality index and Pearson correlation coefficient were calculated for all chosen sites. Since the study was initiated during COVID, initial results show the impact of reduced industrial and urban activities in improving the overall water quality.
ABSTRACT
Mass gathering events commonly encounter environmental challenges that necessitate assurance of water quality and food security. The current outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) call for maintaining safe drinking water supply and providing assessment tools of drinking water quality to avoid contamination in water sources or distribution networks. Arid environmental conditions also add more stress on supplied water to mass gathering events. Herein, we assess the quality of the water supply (desalinated 95% and groundwater 5%) in Makkah city, Saudi Arabia during a mass gathering event in 2019 (9.6 million people) for religious purposes. Fifty five samples were randomly collected from nine different districts of Makkah city, analyzed for TDS, turbidity, pH, EC, free Cl2, Al, Cd, Pb, Cr, F, major ions, coliform and E.coli bacteria and were finally used to estimate the water quality index (WQI). Major ions, trace elements and heavy metals analyses show values below permissible limits in most of the samples, while a few samples show slightly higher values. No bacterial count found in any sample. WQI values of all fifty-five samples were below 50 and were identified as "excellent water". The WQI variations could be attributed to the distribution network conditions rather than a direct impact of adding groundwater with uncontrolled chemical composition. The use of WQI to report the quality of water during mass gathering events to governmental authorities has been proved to be beneficial and should be applied for further mass gathering events worldwide.
ABSTRACT
The trend towards stabilization of coal consumption, observed until 2019, was interrupted due to the Sars-Cov 2 pandemic that affected energy production based on mineral coal, reducing the world demand for this product. The burning of mineral coal for energy production in thermal power plants generates large amounts of waste, such as light ash (fly ash), from electrostatic processes and background ash (botton ash), from desulfurization processes of the chimney gas (Flue Gas Desulfurization - FGD). In many residues, they are stored in open air deposits, becoming a potential risk to the environment and the surrounding ecosystems. In order to improve understanding of the characteristics of these residues, we sought to characterize light ash (CV1) and bottom ash (CV2), residues from the Pecem I and II thermoelectric plants, located in the state of Ceara / Brazil, regarding chemical and physical parameters by means of chemical composition tests by FRX (X-Ray Fluorescence) and EDS (Dispersive Energy Spectroscopy), moisture content, loss to fire, insoluble residue content, specific mass, fineness by air permeability method, granulometric characterization, microstructure evaluation by SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy), thermogravimentation, determination of the mineralogy phases by XRD (X-Ray Diffraction) and evaluation of pozzolanic activity. It was evidenced that CV1 has characteristics compatible with type C fly ash and pozzolanic activity. For CV2 ash, it was observed that the chemical requirements for pozzolanic activity were not met, also presenting high levels of sulfur trioxide and crystalline phases such as Calcite, from the FGD desulfurization process. In both cases, the ashes can be used in cementitious compounds, as long as they are compatible with the characteristics presented, thus enabling the reduction and accumulation of material in the plants, reducing the risks to the environment.
ABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2 has a high transmission rate and shows frequent mutations, thus making vaccine development an arduous task. However, researchers around the globe are working hard to find a solution e.g. synthetic vaccine. Here, we have performed genome-wide analysis of 566 Indian SARS-CoV-2 genomes to extract the potential conserved regions for identifying peptide based synthetic vaccines, viz. epitopes with high immunogenicity and antigenicity. In this regard, different multiple sequence alignment techniques are used to align the SARS-CoV-2 genomes separately. Subsequently, consensus conserved regions are identified after finding the conserved regions from each aligned result of alignment techniques. Further, the consensus conserved regions are refined considering that their lengths are greater than or equal to 60nt and their corresponding proteins are devoid of any stop codons. Subsequently, their specificity as query coverage are verified using Nucleotide BLAST. Finally, with these consensus conserved regions, T-cell and B-cell epitopes are identified based on their immunogenic and antigenic scores which are then used to rank the conserved regions. As a result, we have ranked 23 consensus conserved regions that are associated with different proteins. This ranking also resulted in 34 MHC-I and 37 MHC-II restricted T-cell epitopes with 16 and 19 unique HLA alleles and 29 B-cell epitopes. After ranking, the consensus conserved region from NSP3 gene is obtained that is highly immunogenic and antigenic. In order to judge the relevance of the identified epitopes, the physico-chemical properties and binding conformation of the MHC-I and MHC-II restricted T-cell epitopes are shown with respect to HLA alleles.