Fruit and vegetable waste is an ever-growing global question. Anaerobic digestion techniques have been developed that facilitate turning such waste into possible sources for energy and fertilizer, simultaneously helping to reduce environmental pollution. However, various problems are encountered in applying these techniques. The purpose of this study is to review local and overseas studies, which focus on the use of anaerobic digestion to dispose fruit and vegetable wastes, discuss the acidification problems and solutions in applying anaerobic digestion for fruit and vegetable wastes and investigate the reactor design (comparing single phase with two phase) and the thermal pre-treatment for processing raw wastes. Furthermore, it analyses the dominant microorganisms involved at different stages of digestion and suggests a focus for future studies.

Deleterious mutations contribute to polymorphism even when selection effectively prevents their fixation. The efficacy of selection in removing deleterious mitochondrial mutations from populations depends on the effective population size (Ne) of the mitochondrial DNA and the degree to which a lack of recombination magnifies the effects of linked selection. Using complete mitochondrial genomes from Drosophila melanogaster and nuclear data available from the same samples, we reexamine the hypothesis that nonrecombining animal mitochondrial DNA harbor an excess of deleterious polymorphisms relative to the nuclear genome. We find no evidence of recombination in the mitochondrial genome, and the much-reduced level of mitochondrial synonymous polymorphism relative to nuclear genes is consistent with a reduction in Ne. Nevertheless, we find that the neutrality index, a measure of the excess of nonsynonymous polymorphism relative to the neutral expectation, is only weakly significantly different between mitochondrial and nuclear loci. This difference is likely the result of the larger proportion of beneficial mutations in X-linked relative to autosomal loci, and we find little to no difference between mitochondrial and autosomal neutrality indices. Reanalysis of published data from Homo sapiens reveals a similar lack of a difference between the two genomes, although previous studies have suggested a strong difference in both species. Thus, despite a smaller Ne, mitochondrial loci of both flies and humans appear to experience similar efficacies of purifying selection as do loci in the recombining nuclear genome.

Chemical cross-linking combined with mass spectrometric analysis has become an important technique for probing protein three-dimensional structure and protein–protein interactions. A key step in this process is the accurate identification and validation of cross-linked peptides from tandem mass spectra. The identification of cross-linked peptides, however, presents challenges related to the expanded nature of the search space (all pairs of peptides in a sequence database) and the fact that some peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs) contain one correct and one incorrect peptide but often receive scores that are comparable to those in which both peptides are correctly identified. To address these problems and improve detection of cross-linked peptides, we propose a new database search algorithm, XLSearch, for identifying cross-linked peptides. Our approach is based on a data-driven scoring scheme that independently estimates the probability of correctly identifying each individual peptide in the cross-link given knowledge of the correct or incorrect identification of the other peptide. These conditional probabilities are subsequently used to estimate the joint posterior probability that both peptides are correctly identified. Using the data from two previous cross-link studies, we show the effectiveness of this scoring scheme, particularly in distinguishing between true identifications and those containing one incorrect peptide. We also provide evidence that XLSearch achieves more identifications than two alternative methods at the same false discovery rate (availability: https://github.com/COL-IU/XLSearch).

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