Abstract:Since passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, there has been a long, unresolved struggle to define a key phrase in Section 316(b) of the act: "adverse environmental impact" (AEI). Section 316(b) requires that the best technology available be used in cooling-water intake structures to minimize AEI due to entrainment and impingement of aquatic organisms. Various attempts were made to evaluate and define AEI, including focused national conferences on impact assessment. Unresolved arguments regarding AEI were rein… Show more
“…Next Generation sequencing (NGS) technology produces terabytes of sequencing data in an inexpensive way [ 2 ]. However, among these sequences, most NGS software such as Path, UGENE, JAligner, SSEARCH, Water, and others based on the well-known Smith-Waterman algorithm (SW) [ 3 – 5 ] is designed to align sequences with small gaps and may not be suitable when large deletions are present. Finding such large deletions (and the related counterpart, finding large insertions) has become increasingly more useful in bioinformatics [ 6 , 7 ].…”
Finding large deletions in genome sequences has become increasingly more useful in bioinformatics, such as in clinical research and diagnosis. Although there are a number of publically available next generation sequencing mapping and sequence alignment programs, these software packages do not correctly align fragments containing deletions larger than one kb. We present a fast alignment software package, BinaryPartialAlign, that can be used by wet lab scientists to find long structural variations in their experiments. For BinaryPartialAlign, we make use of the Smith-Waterman (SW) algorithm with a binary-search-based approach for alignment with large gaps that we called partial alignment. BinaryPartialAlign implementation is compared with other straight-forward applications of SW. Simulation results on mtDNA fragments demonstrate the effectiveness (runtime and accuracy) of the proposed method.
“…Next Generation sequencing (NGS) technology produces terabytes of sequencing data in an inexpensive way [ 2 ]. However, among these sequences, most NGS software such as Path, UGENE, JAligner, SSEARCH, Water, and others based on the well-known Smith-Waterman algorithm (SW) [ 3 – 5 ] is designed to align sequences with small gaps and may not be suitable when large deletions are present. Finding such large deletions (and the related counterpart, finding large insertions) has become increasingly more useful in bioinformatics [ 6 , 7 ].…”
Finding large deletions in genome sequences has become increasingly more useful in bioinformatics, such as in clinical research and diagnosis. Although there are a number of publically available next generation sequencing mapping and sequence alignment programs, these software packages do not correctly align fragments containing deletions larger than one kb. We present a fast alignment software package, BinaryPartialAlign, that can be used by wet lab scientists to find long structural variations in their experiments. For BinaryPartialAlign, we make use of the Smith-Waterman (SW) algorithm with a binary-search-based approach for alignment with large gaps that we called partial alignment. BinaryPartialAlign implementation is compared with other straight-forward applications of SW. Simulation results on mtDNA fragments demonstrate the effectiveness (runtime and accuracy) of the proposed method.
Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act requires that cooling-water intake structures (CWIS) use Best Technology Available (BTA) to minimize adverse environmental impacts (AEI). The U.S. EPA has not defined AEI, and there is no clear consensus regarding its definition. Nonetheless, operational definitions are necessary to evaluate design alternatives and to measure the success of mitigative measures. Rather than having to develop measures of aquatic health that are highly site-specific, controversial, and often unlikely to elicit agreement from all sides of the environmental “fence”, it may be more productive to use existing ecological assessment tools. Aquatic Life Uses (ALU) already provide a regulatory framework to assess the quality (health) of the aquatic community in various habitats (e.g., warmwater habitat, exceptional warmwater habitat). Attainment of the ALU indicates that further point source controls are unnecessary, whereas nonattainment indicates that those pollutants or stressors causing the nonattainment must be reduced. A similar approach for existing water intakes is recommended. That is, attainment of the designated ALU will be taken as an indication that there is no AEI. Although attainment of the ALU may not be a foolproof indicator of a lack of AEI, this approach seems more reasonable that using scarce monetary resources to fix problems that likely do not exist, or having both regulators and the regulated community expend their resources debating whether various observed biological responses do or do not constitute AEI.
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