An Acceptability Trial of Desiccated Beef Liver and Meat Powder as Potential Fortifiers of Complementary Diets of Young Children in Indonesia

The addition of desiccated beef liver to infant and young child complementary foods can be used to overcome nutrient deficits, however its acceptability is unknown. We conducted a series of studies to test the acceptability of complementary foods fortified with either powdered beef liver, beef meat, beef liver + meat or placebo among 96 Indonesian children aged 12 to 23 mo. This was achieved by determining liking of a single test food with added study powder, followed by a 2‐wk home trial and focus group discussions to assess liking during repeated consumption of the study powders added to daily meals. The test food with added beef powders were well liked by mothers, with liking scores never falling below neutral on a 7‐point scale. After home use, mothers reported that their children moderately liked their meals with added powder, with scores ranging between 3.3 and 3.5 on a 5‐point scale. With the exception of lower liking for the combination beef liver + meat powder, there were no detectable differences in mothers’ overall perception of child's liking between the placebo and any of the study powders. The low disappearance rate of the study powders during the home trial was a concern, with mothers reporting a strong smell and fishy odor as the major reason why children did not like their meals. Nonetheless, mothers declared they would continue using the powder on account of the nutritional value and perceived health benefits. Strategies are underway to minimize the level of fishy odor in the beef liver powder.     

Hierarchical Voting-Based Feature Selection and Ensemble Learning Model Scheme for Glioma Grading with Clinical and Molecular Characteristics

Determining the aggressiveness of gliomas, termed grading, is a critical step toward treatment optimization to increase the survival rate and decrease treatment toxicity for patients. Streamlined grading using molecular information has the potential to facilitate decision making in the clinic and aid in treatment planning. In recent years, molecular markers have increasingly gained importance in the classification of tumors. In this study, we propose a novel hierarchical voting-based methodology for improving the performance results of the feature selection stage and machine learning models for glioma grading with clinical and molecular predictors. To identify the best scheme for the given soft-voting-based ensemble learning model selections, we utilized publicly available TCGA and CGGA datasets and employed four dimensionality reduction methods to carry out a voting-based ensemble feature selection and five supervised models, with a total of sixteen combination sets. We also compared our proposed feature selection method with the LASSO feature selection method in isolation. The computational results indicate that the proposed method achieves 87.606% and 79.668% accuracy rates on TCGA and CGGA datasets, respectively, outperforming the LASSO feature selection method.     

A novel permission-based Android malware detection system using feature selection based on linear regression

Neural Computing and Applications - With the developments in mobile and wireless technology, mobile devices have become an important part of our lives. While Android is the leading operating system...     

Rational Biocatalyst Design for a Cyanide-Free Synthesis of Long-Chain Fatty Nitriles from Their Aldoximes

Recently, the capability of the aldoxime dehydratase from Bacillus sp. (OxdB) for the transformation of fatty aldoximes into fatty nitriles with impressive substrate loadings is reported. However, the substrate scope of this biocatalyst turned out to be limited in terms of the chain length with decanal oxime being the substrate with the longest well tolerated n-alkyl chain. Besides the increased bulkiness of the long-chain aldoximes, their strongly decreased water solubility represents a further hurdle for an efficient biotransformation. Addressing this challenge of an expanded substrate spectrum comprising long-chain fatty aldoximes, this work investigates the substrate solubility and enzyme kinetics in combination with molecular modeling in order to find an enzyme mutant being suitable for C12- to C16-aldoximes. Both, fatty aldoxime solubility in water and the active site of the wild-type enzyme OxdB are identified as critical issues for an efficient biotransformation of these substrates. The activity issue is addressed by a rational design of a mutant using a homology modeling as well as a molecular modeling software suitable for enzymes. With the resulting double mutant OxdB-F289A/L293A, this report can achieve successful biotransformations with the C12- to C16-aldoximes at substrate concentrations of 250 × 10⁻³ to 1000 × 10⁻³ m . For example, an excellent conversion of >99% is obtained with tetradecanal oxime. Practical applications: Fatty nitriles with a prolonged chain length of C12 or more are of high interest in industry due to their use for the production of fatty amines on large technical scale. As an alternative route, fatty nitriles can be generated from their aldoximes by means of an aldoxime dehydratase (Oxd) as biocatalyst. The conversion of long-chain fatty aldoximes, however, remained a challenge up to now. This work describes the optimization of the aldoxime dehydratase OxdB from Bacillus sp. for the dehydration of nonsoluble bulky fatty aldoximes. The created variant can convert long chain fatty aldoximes toward the corresponding nitrile as demonstrated for C12- to C16-nitriles. In addition, high conversion (of up to >99%) is achieved when operating at high substrate concentrations of up to 1000 × 10⁻³ m , thus making this approach interesting for industrial applications.     

Gradient Type-II CdSe/CdSeTe/CdTe Core/Crown/Crown Heteronanoplatelets with Asymmetric Shape and Disproportional Excitonic Properties

Characterized by their strong 1D confinement and long-lifetime red-shifted emission spectra, colloidal nanoplatelets (NPLs) with type-II electronic structure provide an exciting ground to design complex heterostructures with remarkable properties. This work demonstrates the synthesis and optical characterization of CdSe/CdSeTe/CdTe core/crown/crown NPLs having a step-wise gradient electronic structure and disproportional wavefunction distribution, in which the excitonic properties of the electron and hole can be finely tuned through adjusting the geometry of the intermediate crown. The first crown with staggered configuration gives rise to a series of direct and indirect transition channels that activation/deactivation of each channel is possible through wavefunction engineering. Moreover, these NPLs allow for switching between active channels with temperature, where lattice contraction directly affects the electron–hole (e–h) overlap. Dominated by the indirect transition channels over direct transitions, the lifetime of the NPLs starts to increase at 9 K, indicative of low dark-bright exciton splitting energy. The charge transfer states from the two type-II interfaces promote a large number of indirect transitions, which effectively increase the absorption of low-energy photons critical for nonlinear properties. As a result, these NPLs demonstrate exceptionally high two-photon absorption cross-sections with the highest value of 12.9 × 10⁶ GM and superlinear behavior.