Health Benefits of Anthocyanins and Their Encapsulation for Potential Use in Food Systems: A Review

Anthocyanins are one of the six subgroups of large and widespread group of plant constituents known as flavonoids. These are responsible for the bright and attractive orange, red, purple, and blue colors of most fruits, vegetables, flowers and some cereal grains. More than 600 structurally distinct anthocyanins have been identified in nature. Earlier, anthocyanins were only known for their coloring properties but now interest in anthocyanin pigments has intensified because of their possible health benefits as dietary antioxidants, which help to prevent neuronal diseases, cardiovascular illnesses, cancer, diabetes, inflammation, and many such others diseases. Ability of anthocyanins to counter oxidants makes them atherosclerosis fighters. Therefore, anthocyanin-rich foods may help to boost overall health by offering an array of nutrients. However, the incorporation of anthocyanins into food and medical products is a challenging task due to their low stability toward environmental conditions during processing and storage. Encapsulation seems to be an efficient way to introduce such compounds into these products. Encapsulating agents act as a protector coat against ambient adverse conditions such as light, humidity, and oxygen. Encapsulated bioactive compounds are easier to handle and offer improved stability. The main objective of this review is to explore health benefits of anthocyanins and their extraction, characterization, encapsulation, and delivery.     

Functional and Edible Uses of Soy Protein Products

ABSTRACT: Consumers are becoming increasingly interested in healthful foods and are open to soy protein ingredients. Soybeans as food are very versatile and a rich source of essential nutrients. They are also an excellent source of good‐quality protein, comparable to other protein foods, and suitable for all ages. Adverse nutritional and other undesirable effects followed by the consumption of raw soybean meal have been attributed to the presence of endogenous inhibitors of digestive enzymes and lectins, as well as poor digestibility. To improve the nutritional quality of soy foods, inhibitors and lectins are generally inactivated by heat or eliminated by fractionation during food processing. Soybeans provide an alternative source of protein for people who are allergic to milk protein. Soy protein is highly digestible (92% to 100%) and contains all essential amino acids. Although relatively low in methionine, it is a good source of lysine. Soy‐protein products contain a high concentration of isoflavones, up to 1 g/kg. Increased acceptance of soy proteins is due to unmatched qualities like good functional properties in food applications, high nutritional quality, abundance, availability, and low cost. At present the various forms of soy proteins are primarily utilized for their functional effects rather than their nutritional properties. This article summarizes the integrated overview of the widely available, scattered information about the nutritional and functional uses of the soy proteins when applied in food systems and intends to present the most current knowledge with an interest to stimulate further research to optimize their beneficial effects.     

Evaluation of Bus Based Interconnect Mechanisms in Clustered VLIW Architectures

With new sophisticated compiler technology, it is possible to schedule distant instructions efficiently. As a consequence, the amount of exploitable instruction level parallelism (ILP) in applications has gone up considerably. However, monolithic register file VLIW architectures present scalability problems due to a centralized register file which is far slower than the functional units (FU). Clustered VLIW architectures, with a subset of FUs connected to any RF provide an attractive solution to address this issue. Recent studies with a wide variety of inter-cluster interconnection mechanisms have reported substantial gains in performance (number of cycles) over the most studied RF-to-RF type interconnections. However, these studies have compared only one or two design points in the RF-to-RF interconnects design space. In this paper, we extend the previous reported work. We consider both multi-cycle and pipelined buses. To obtain realistic bus latencies, we synthesized the various architectures and calculated post-layout clock periods. The results demonstrate that while there is less that 10% variation in interconnect area, the bus based architectures are slower by as much as 400%. Also, neither multi-cycle or pipelined buses nor increasing the number of buses itself is able to achieve performance comparable to point-to-point type interconnects.     

Characterization of Phytagel® modified soy protein isolate resin and unidirectional flax yarn reinforced “green” composites

The mechanical properties and moisture resistance of the soy protein isolate (SPI) resin and flax yarn reinforced composites were improved significantly by incorporation of a poly‐carboxylic acid based modifier, Phytagel®. SPI and Phytagel® were blended to form an interpenetrating network‐like cross‐linked complex. This complex showed significantly improved tensile and moisture properties as well as higher thermal stability as compared to the unmodified SPI resin. The incorporation of Phytagel® (40% w/w of SPI powder) in SPI resin and subsequent lowering of the amount of glycerol (from 30% to 12.5%) led to an overall 10‐fold increase in the tensile fracture stress and a nine‐fold increase in the Young's moduli of the SPI resin along with a seven‐fold decrease in fracture strain. The dynamic mechanical properties such as storage and loss modulus of the modified resin increased and the glass transition temperature also increased by about 56°C. The unidirectional flax yarn reinforced composites were made using two modified resins with 20% and 40% Phytagel® contents. Both resins contained 12.5% glycerol. The composites fabricated using resin containing 20% Phytagel® showed significantly higher tensile and flexural moduli as well as fracture stress in the axial direction than the composites with resin containing 40% Phytagel®, which was higher than the SPI resin based composites. POLYM. COMPOS., 26:647–659, 2005. © 2005 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Bioethanol production from tuber crops using fermentation technology: a review

Bioethanol, an alcohol produced by fermentation of plant biomass containing starch and sugars by micro-organisms, considered as a dominant form of fuel for future. Production of this renewable fuel, especially from starchy materials such as tuber crops, holds a remarkable potential to meet the future energy demand because of its high production and comparitively less demand for use as food and fodder. This review focuses on the world bioethanol production scenario from various tuber crops, namely cassava, sweet potato, potato, yam, aroids, sugar beet, etc., fermentation techniques and micro-organisms used in fermentation process along with its future prospects. The advances in metabolic pathway engineering and genetic engineering techniques have led to the development of micro-organisms capable of efficiently converting biomass sugars into ethanol. Several biotechnological tools that are also available for the improvement of microorganisms to meet the harsh environments typically met with certain industrial fermentation process are also discussed.     

Wideband transimpedance amplifier using negative capacitance and capacitive feedback

This paper presents a microwave system for heartbeat rate measurement. This system is based on using a vector network analyzer and horn antennas. The system generates a continuous wave signal toward a person’s chest then the reflected signal is analyzed. The phase difference between the emitted and the reflected signals contains information about the chest movement; hence, the heartbeat rate can be extracted. In this work, several scenarios for detecting the heart activity are considered. The first scenario aims to provide a comparative study for using single-antenna and two-antennas microwave systems. Several radiated powers are considered in this scenario. Simultaneously with the microwave system, a wireless electrocardiograph is used as reference in order to determine the accuracy of the system. Measurements are performed in both cases when breathing normally and when holding the breath. The second scenario aims to test the ability of detecting the heartbeat activity of a person while moving. Measurements are performed while the subject walks towards the radar. Modeling is used for this purpose. The operating frequency used is 20 GHz in both scenarios. Signals are processed using wavelet transform and results show the ability to extract the heartbeat rate even with the presence of body movement.     

Energy efficient rendezvous points based routing technique using multiple mobile sink in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Wireless Networks - In recent decades, Sensor nodes (SNs) are used in numerous uses of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) to obtain a variety of sensing data sources. Sink mobility...     

Mycobacterium tuberculosis Acetyltransferase Suppresses Oxidative Stress by Inducing Peroxisome Formation in Macrophages

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) inhibits host oxidative stress responses facilitating its survival in macrophages; however, the underlying molecular mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we identified a Mtb acetyltransferase (Rv3034c) as a novel counter actor of macrophage oxidative stress responses by inducing peroxisome formation. An inducible Rv3034c deletion mutant of Mtb failed to induce peroxisome biogenesis, expression of the peroxisomal β-oxidation pathway intermediates (ACOX1, ACAA1, MFP2) in macrophages, resulting in reduced intracellular survival compared to the parental strain. This reduced virulence phenotype was rescued by repletion of Rv3034c. Peroxisome induction depended on the interaction between Rv3034c and the macrophage mannose receptor (MR). Interaction between Rv3034c and MR induced expression of the peroxisomal biogenesis proteins PEX5p, PEX13p, PEX14p, PEX11β, PEX19p, the peroxisomal membrane lipid transporter ABCD3, and catalase. Expression of PEX14p and ABCD3 was also enhanced in lungs from Mtb aerosol-infected mice. This is the first report that peroxisome-mediated control of ROS balance is essential for innate immune responses to Mtb but can be counteracted by the mycobacterial acetyltransferase Rv3034c. Thus, peroxisomes represent interesting targets for host-directed therapeutics to tuberculosis.     

Characterization and functional properties of watermelon (<Emphasis Type=Italic>Citrullus lanatus</Emphasis>) seed protein isolates and salt assisted protein concentrates

Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) seed meal contains significant amount of extractable protein which can be used as nutritional and functional ingredients in food formulations. Alkali (0.1 M) and NaCl (0.5 M) were used to prepare protein isolates and concentrates from the defatted watermelon seed meals. Protein isolates reported protein yield of 35.15–38.27% and protein content (79.05–83.79%) which was significantly (p≤0.05) higher than the protein concentrates. SDS-PAGE of protein isolates and concentrates showed major polypeptides in the range of 74.72–110.42 kDa. Also, in vitro pepsin digestibility showed that most of the proteins were readily digested within 30 min of hydrolysis. Amino acids were dominated by arginine, aspartic, and glutamic acid. DSC results indicated that protein concentrates had significantly (p≤0.05) higher denaturation temperatures than protein isolates. The functional properties of concentrates in terms of solubility and surface properties were better than respective isolates. The results indicated that NaCl extracted proteins had comparatively better functional properties but their yield is significantly lower than respective protein isolates.