Aquaponics treatment system inspired by sewage plants grows tastier crops and keeps fish healthy
Researchers develop a novel fish waste treatment system that breaks down fish sludge and turns nutrients from fish waste into an effective fertilizer for plants
2021-06-14
(Press-News.org) A current challenge for sustainable aquaculture is how to increase the quantities of farmed fish while also reducing waste products that can lead to the accumulation of harmful fish sludge. New research aims to understand how this fish waste can be treated for use in aquaponics systems, by removing excessive carbon, yet preserving the mineral nutrients required by plants to grow.
In this study in Frontiers in Plant Science, researchers from the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, demonstrate a novel and effective way to convert this fish sludge into plant fertilizer and therefore improving the nutrients available for plants in hydroponic plant cultivation. The lead author, Mr Victor Lobanov explains:
"Fish sludge is a waste product made up of uneaten food and fish feces and is normally broken down by bacteria in the water. In addition to physically harming fish gills, excess carbon in the solids leads to excessive bacterial growth - diminishing oxygen in the water and hampering the ability of the fish to breathe. We wanted to find out whether this waste could be used to fertilize plants in aquaponics systems by removing the excessive carbon, yet preserving the minerals needed for growing crops."
Fish waste as fertilizer
The researchers investigated a potential solution inspired by sewage and wastewater treatment plants found around the world, called enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR). This process was adapted by the researchers so that the risk of bacteria build up in the water was reduced, but the minerals from the fish waste were soluble in the water and could therefore be biologically available for plants to take up.
They found that the solid treatment system they developed was highly effective at delivering nutrients from the fish waste to the aquaponic system in the form of a liquid fertilizer equally as efficiently as a commercial nutrient solution. Although the fertilizer did not meet plant needs entirely as some nutrients such as manganese were missing, the researchers hope to optimize this system in future studies:
"Hopefully we can scale the system more efficiently in the future, not just for lettuce as used in this study but as well as for other plants, with the right number of fish corresponding to the size of the system. By further optimizing the breakdown of fish solids by the solid treatment system, we can also achieve a faster treatment rate and make the whole process more efficient," explains Mr Lobanov.
Commercial fertilizer solutions often have very high levels of nitrogen, stimulating crops to swell and absorb large amounts of water and giving the appearance of improved growth but often decreasing the amounts of minerals in the plant. Despite the fertilizer created by the solids treatment system containing lower levels of nitrogen than commercially available chemical fertilizers, plants were not nutrient deficient. This suggests that the high nitrogen levels commonly used are in excess of what the plants need. The authors hope that this finding will stimulate further research into the connections between plant nutrients, health and taste:
"Our work shows that this type of cultivation is not only more sustainable, but it is also capable of providing nutrients in a form that is easily accessible to plants. Farmers can take this system and optimize it for their specific crops and production volumes, potentially even supplementing with additional nutrients if required."
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-06-14
DNA is an abundant and nutritious food source for microbes
The diet of microbes is vast: They are able to use different molecules as nutrients, including biomolecules such as proteins and lipids of dead and decaying organisms. This includes so called extracellular DNA molecules which are not or no longer present in intact cells. "From the bacteria's perspective DNA is particularly nutritious," says Kenneth Wasmund, a microbiologist at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CMESS) at the University of Vienna and lead author of the study. "It's essentially a fertilizer. After all, it is a chain of millions of pieces of sugar and phosphorus- and nitrogen-containing bases." Extracellular ...
2021-06-14
Universal school lunch programs make students healthier, and increase their lifetime income by 3%, according to a unique study from Lund University in Sweden published in The Review of Economic Studies.
Health disparities arise early in life and play a major role in economic outcomes among adults. Yet there are few studies on the long-term effects of school-based nutrition policies aimed at counteracting them. Researchers from Lund University and Stockholm University can now show that universal school lunch programs have significant long-term benefits for students' education, general health and income.
"Today, we take school lunches for granted in Sweden. But the fact is, it was a very conscious ...
2021-06-14
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Yuhao Chen, Yue Li, Meng Du, Jinsui Yu, Fei Gao, Zhen Yuan and Zhiyi Chen from The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, China, University of South China, Hunan, China and University of Macau, China discuss ultrasound neuromodulation: integrating medicine and engineering for neurological disease treatment.
Neurological diseases associated with dysfunctions of neural circuits, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), depression and epilepsy, have become increasingly prevalent. To tackle these issues, artificial stimulation or regulation ...
2021-06-14
Niigata, Japan - Biomarkers are important determinants of appropriate and effective therapeutic approaches for various diseases including cancer. There is ample evidence pointing toward the significance of immune check point inhibitors (ICI) against cancer, and they showed promising clinical benefits to a specific group of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). Several reports demonstrated the efficacy of biomarkers such as programmed death-1 protein ligand (PD-L1), density of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), and tumor mutational burden (TMB), to determine the patient responsiveness for the efficient use of ICIs as therapeutics against cancer.
A high level of TMB (TMB-H), ...
2021-06-14
Quantum technologies are based on quantum properties of light, electrons, and atoms. In recent decades, scientists have learned to master these phenomena and exploit them in applications. Thus, the construction of a quantum computer for commercial applications is also coming within reach. One of the emerging technologies that is currently being advanced very successfully is ion trap quantum computers. Here, charged particles are trapped with electromagnetic fields in a vacuum chamber and prepared in such a way that they can serve as carriers for information and be used for computing, which includes cooling them to the lowest temperatures permitted by quantum mechanics. However, the quantum mechanical ...
2021-06-14
Various platforms which offer food home delivery services through courier services, such as riders or other types of distributors, have proliferated very quickly in recent years, especially in big cities. Due to this boom in last-mile delivery or logistics, UOC experts have studied the operation of the main food home delivery platforms, such as Just Eat, Glovo and Deliveroo, which work in the city of Barcelona, to analyse the profitability of these business models and estimate the number of orders needed to achieve this profitability.
"It's very difficult for these business models to be profitable by themselves", said Eduard J. Álvarez Palau, a researcher from the SUMA research group of the UOC's Faculty of Economics and Business, the main author of this work ...
2021-06-14
Near-field light is invisible light at the subwavelength scale. Harnessed for a variety of practical applications, such as wireless power transfer, near-field light has an increasingly significant role in the development of miniature on-chip photonic devices. Controlling the direction of near-field light propagation has been an ongoing challenge that is of fundamental interest in photonics physics and can significantly advance a variety of applications.
So far, propagation of near-field light in a single direction is achieved by specific interactions between ...
2021-06-14
The human gut microbiome is a complex community of trillions of microbes that are constantly interacting with each other and our bodies. It supports our wellbeing, immune system and mental health - but how is it sustained?
Researchers in the UK and Germany, alongside other international collaborators, have investigated the evolution of bacteria in the human gut microbiome - asking how these microbes persist throughout their lifetimes - taking into account internal and external influencing factors.
The results of the study will help inform tailored probiotics, live bacteria found in particular foods or supplements, as well as dietary ...
2021-06-14
The structure of a biomolecule can reveal much about its functioning and interaction with the surrounding environment. The double-helical structure of DNA and its implications for the processes of transmission of genetic information form an obvious example. In a new study by SISSA - Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, published in Nucleic Acids Research, experimental data were combined with computer simulations of molecular dynamics to examine the conformation of an RNA fragment involved in protein synthesis and its dependence on the salts present in the solution. The research has led to a new method for high-resolution definition of the structures of biomolecules in their physiological environments. ...
2021-06-14
BOSTON - Bronchiolitis--the most common lung infection in young children, and which is most often caused by respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV--is the leading cause of hospitalizations in U.S. infants, and about 30% of those with severe bronchiolitis later develop asthma. A team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has uncovered four distinct molecular subtypes of RSV bronchiolitis and has linked a certain subtype to a higher asthma risk. The findings are published in Nature Communications.
"While bronchiolitis has been considered a single ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Aquaponics treatment system inspired by sewage plants grows tastier crops and keeps fish healthy
Researchers develop a novel fish waste treatment system that breaks down fish sludge and turns nutrients from fish waste into an effective fertilizer for plants
