Fukunaga Kimitoshi

Crude glycerin as by-product of bio diesel fuels. For every 1 ton of biodiesel produced, approximately 100kg of glycerol is also created. It is unworthily waste for most small-scale producers due to the large investment in technology necessary for the refining process, although it is possible to refine crude glycerin into a marketable product. In order to reuse it efficiently, we conducted a field trial to confirm an effect of crude glycerol as an accelerator material in composting of felled wood tips. Addition of 1% and 10% of crude glycerol gave high fermentation temperature by 5℃ and 10℃ than that of control for one month. As a result of fertilizer component analysis, crude glycerol treated compost has equivalent components to control. Furthermore, crude glycerol treated compost showed fertilizer efficacy as well as control in germination and growth test of carrot and Komatsu's green.

A novel convenient method for entrapping enzymes or microbial cells by the use of photo-crosslinkable resin prepolymer containing poly (N-vinylpyrrolidone) and ethyleneglycol dimethacrylate was described. Glucoamylase, used as test enzyme, was entrapped successfully and easily in the resin formed by the illumination with a Hg lamp. The relative activity of the glucoamylase entrapped in the resin was affected by the proportion of enzyme and prepolymers in the immobilization system. The entrapped glucoamylase showed about 4.5 times higher K_m value and about 2.5 times lower V_<max> value compared with the native glucoamylase (pH 4.5,35℃, substrate : maltose). The pH and temperature dependencies of the enzyme reaction were also compared between the entrapped and native glucoamylases.

Recently, researches concerning the computer-assisted organic synthesis design are attracted. Constructing the system is very interesting problem as the application of knowledge engineering. Since chemist Corey has been developed the OCSS and LHASA as such system, several systems have been developed by many reserchers. However, the detailes of the systems can not be opened to the public. The authors try to development of the original organic synthesis design supporting system based on LHASA and present the fundamental framework of the system. This system runs in ACOS-6 through the use of color graphic display (NEC N6940). Each module is written in proper language, LISP and FORTRAN.