Integrity testing large virus filter assemblies

• Book ID: 101723065
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 40 KB
• Volume: 103
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0006-3592
• DOI: 10.1002/bit.22373

✦ Synopsis

Thousands of man-made chemicals are essential ingredients of our life. However, the biodegradability of most of these chemicals is not known, and their accumulation in the environment can have a negative impact on human health and on ecosystems. The assessment of the biodegradability of the chemicals used should be a factor in the design of new sustainable products and processes. There exist computational methods that allow the predictions of the reactions and pathways that can degrade a chemical, and these methods can generate a large number of possible pathways. Finley, Broadbelt and Hatzimanikatis propose the evaluation of these alternatives based on the thermodynamic analysis of the predicted pathways. They show that it is important to consider the thermodynamic topology of the reactions in the context of the entire biodegradation pathway. Their analysis suggests that the most energetically favorable pathways can be energetically expensive for an organism, and therefore, such pathways might be hard to evolve in nature.