Daily Monitoring at a Full-Scale Wastewater Treatment Plant Reveals Temporally Variable Micropollutant Biotransformations.

Despite decades of micropollutant (MP) monitoring at wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), we lack a fundamental understanding of the time-varying metabolic processes driving MP biotransformations. To address this knowledge gap, we collected 24-h composite samples from the influent and effluent of the conventional activated sludge (CAS) process at a WWTP over 14 consecutive days. We used liquid chromatography and high-resolution mass spectrometry to (i) quantify 184 MPs in the influent and effluent of the CAS process; (ii) characterize temporal dynamics of MP removal and biotransformation rate constants; and (iii) discover biotransformations linked to temporally variable MP biotransformation rate constants. We measured 120 MPs in at least one sample and 66 MPs in every sample. There were 24 MPs exhibiting temporally variable removal throughout the sampling campaign. We used hierarchical clustering analysis to reveal four temporal trends in biotransformation rate constants and found MPs with specific structural features co-located in the four clusters. We screened our HRMS acquisitions for evidence of specific biotransformations linked to structural features among the 24 MPs. Our analyses reveal that alcohol oxidations, monohydroxylations at secondary or tertiary aliphatic carbons, dihydroxylations of vic-unsubstituted rings, and monohydroxylations at unsubstituted rings are biotransformations that exhibit variability on daily timescales.

Identifying Functional Groups that Determine Rates of Micropollutant Biotransformations Performed by Wastewater Microbial Communities.

The goal of this research was to identify functional groups that determine rates of micropollutant (MP) biotransformations performed by wastewater microbial communities. To meet this goal, we performed a series of incubation experiments seeded with four independent wastewater microbial communities and spiked them with a mixture of 40 structurally diverse MPs. We collected samples over time and used high-resolution mass spectrometry to estimate biotransformation rate constants for each MP in each experiment and to propose structures of 46 biotransformation products. We then developed random forest models to classify the biotransformation rate constants based on the presence of specific functional groups or observed biotransformations. We extracted classification importance metrics from each random forest model and compared them across wastewater microbial communities. Our analysis revealed 30 functional groups that we define as either biotransformation promoters, biotransformation inhibitors, structural features that can be biotransformed based on uncharacterized features of the wastewater microbial community, or structural features that are not rate-determining. Our experimental data and analysis provide novel insights into MP biotransformations that can be used to more accurately predict MP biotransformations or to inform the design of new chemical products that may be more readily biodegradable during wastewater treatment.

Contextual constraint and lexical competition: Revisiting biased misperception during reading.

In identifying and accessing lexical items while comprehending text, readers must rapidly select a word from visually similar words before integrating it into a sentence. It has been proposed that readers are likely to misperceive a low frequency word as a highly frequent orthographically similar alternative, particularly when the alternative is supported by previous context (Gregg & Inhoff, 2016; Perea & Pollatsek, 1998; Pollatsek, Perea, & Binder, 1999; Slattery, 2009). In such cases, the misperception may not be corrected until the reader encounters incongruent information. However, many of these studies place incongruent text directly after the critical word, confounding whether readers regress backward in text to resolve their misperception or to halt forward text progression in order resolve a lexical level conflict between the word form and its competitor. In 3 eye tracking while reading experiments, we adapted materials from previous studies to include a postcritical spillover region to address this possibility. Two of these experiments were designed to permit an ex-Gaussian analysis of the distribution of first pass reading prior to disambiguating information. The evidence suggests that postlexical competition-inhibition between orthographically similar forms can delay forward movement of the eyes as a competitor is inhibited. The possibility that misperception and postlexical competition-inhibition arise from the same set of mechanisms is discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Comparison of Small Molecule Biotransformation Half-Lives between Activated Sludge and Soil: Opportunities for Read-Across?

Compartment-specific degradation half-lives are essential pieces of information in the regulatory risk assessment of synthetic chemicals. However, their measurement according to regulatory testing guidelines is laborious and costly. Despite the obvious ecological and economic benefits of knowing environmental degradability as early as possible, its consideration in the early phases of rational chemical design is therefore challenging. Here, we explore the possibility to use half-lives determined in highly time- and work-efficient biotransformation experiments with activated sludge and mixtures of chemicals to predict soil half-lives from regulatory simulation studies. We experimentally determined half-lives for 52 structurally diverse agrochemical active ingredients in batch reactors with three concentrations of the same activated sludge. We then developed bi- and multivariate models for predicting half-lives in soil by regressing the experimentally determined half-lives in activated sludge against average soil half-lives of the same chemicals extracted from regulatory data. The models differed in how we accounted for sorption-related bioavailability differences in soil and activated sludge. The best-performing models exhibited good coefficients of determination (R2 of around 0.8) and low average errors (

Parents׳ experiences of raising pre-school aged children in an outer-Melbourne growth corridor.

There is growing concern about the outer-suburbs in Australia as healthy places to raise children. This paper aimed to explore this from the perspectives of parents raising preschool-age children in an outer-Melbourne municipality. Findings showed that parents were positive about the natural environment as well as the provision of recreation areas and generally felt their neighbourhoods were a safe place for raising children. However, car-dependency, housing estate design and limited local job opportunities all appeared to contribute to social isolation amongst families. Using the Environments for Health Framework, this paper makes suggestions to improve liveability for families in this municipality.