Browsing by Subject "Legionella"
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Item Open Access EVALUATION OF RECLAIMED WATER FOR COOLING IN COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS OF NORTH CAROLINA(2012-04-27) Lee, Meng-YingCooling systems for thermoelectric power generation are responsible for 39% of the freshwater withdrawal in the US. As the demand for electricity increases, finding alternative water source is crucial. Studies have shown that reclaimed water can be used in certain applications, including makeup water in power plant cooling systems. Concerns about reclaimed water for cooling purpose include potential environmental health impacts during the cooling process, and reclaimed water availability for the cooling systems. This study reviewed the federal and NC state regulations governing the use of reclaimed water for cooling purposes, and the toxicological and epidemiological studies on potential human health impacts of hazards emitted from the cooling systems. In addition, a scenario analysis was conducted to assess reclaimed water availability for coal-fired power plants in NC regarding water transportation costs. The result showed that using a spatial-economic optimization model considering pipeline construction conditions and the potential of pipeline merging can effectively minimize the pipeline construction cost and obtain the least-cost pipeline network infrastructure. The unit transport cost analysis for each power plant also provided the power plant companies the practical information they need for evaluating the feasibility of reclaimed water application for each power plant. Considering the potential issues from water quality and availability, establishing stable supply-demand relationships between reclaimed water source and power plants can be beneficial for both water quality control and makeup water security for power plants.Item Open Access Search for microRNAs expressed by intracellular bacterial pathogens in infected mammalian cells.(PLoS One, 2014) Furuse, Yuki; Finethy, Ryan; Saka, Hector A; Xet-Mull, Ana M; Sisk, Dana M; Smith, Kristen L Jurcic; Lee, Sunhee; Coers, Jörn; Valdivia, Raphael H; Tobin, David M; Cullen, Bryan RMicroRNAs are expressed by all multicellular organisms and play a critical role as post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression. Moreover, different microRNA species are known to influence the progression of a range of different diseases, including cancer and microbial infections. A number of different human viruses also encode microRNAs that can attenuate cellular innate immune responses and promote viral replication, and a fungal pathogen that infects plants has recently been shown to express microRNAs in infected cells that repress host cell immune responses and promote fungal pathogenesis. Here, we have used deep sequencing of total expressed small RNAs, as well as small RNAs associated with the cellular RNA-induced silencing complex RISC, to search for microRNAs that are potentially expressed by intracellular bacterial pathogens and translocated into infected animal cells. In the case of Legionella and Chlamydia and the two mycobacterial species M. smegmatis and M. tuberculosis, we failed to detect any bacterial small RNAs that had the characteristics expected for authentic microRNAs, although large numbers of small RNAs of bacterial origin could be recovered. However, a third mycobacterial species, M. marinum, did express an ∼ 23-nt small RNA that was bound by RISC and derived from an RNA stem-loop with the characteristics expected for a pre-microRNA. While intracellular expression of this candidate bacterial microRNA was too low to effectively repress target mRNA species in infected cultured cells in vitro, artificial overexpression of this potential bacterial pre-microRNA did result in the efficient repression of a target mRNA. This bacterial small RNA therefore represents the first candidate microRNA of bacterial origin.