Die einzelnen Lebensmittel (Chemie, Technologie, Analytik)

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Materials used by dental technicians in South Africa

Coronary heart disease and stroke are the commonest causes of illness and death for people living in the UK. We urgently need a better understanding of their aetiology. Recent research at the Medical Research Council's Environmental Epidemiology Unit is showing that impaired growth in fetal life and infancy have profound long-term consequences for health in adulthood. Improving maternal and infant health may be the key to effective prevention of cardiovascular disease in adult life.     

Why for feed and not for human consumption? The black soldier fly larvae

With the surge in consumption of insects, the search continues to find ways to increase the popularity of insect‐based products in the Western world. The black soldier fly larvae (BSFL), which is mainly utilized for animal feed, has great potential to provide a sustainable source of nutrients for human food. This review aims to discuss some of the key benefits and challenges of BSFL and their potential role as a food ingredient and/or product for human consumption. Few articles specifically discuss BSFL as a food source, therefore a comprehensive literature search strategy consisted of collecting and evaluating published data about BSFL as animal feed that could be relevant to its use in food. The hurdles that need to be overcome in order to introduce BSFL as a viable food option include safety concerns, technofunctional properties, nutritional aspects, consumer attitudes, and product applications for BSFL.     

Microarray analysis reveals a mechanism of phenolic polybrominated diphenylether toxicity in zebrafish

Polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs) are ubiquitous in the environment, with the lower brominated congener 2,2',4,4'-tetrabromodiphenylether (BDE47) among the most prevalent. The phenolic PBDE, 6-hydroxy-BDE47 (6-OH-BDE47) is both an important metabolite formed by in vivo metabolism of BDE47 and a natural product produced by marine organisms such as algae. Although this compound has been detected in humans and wildlife, including fish, virtually nothing is known of its in vivo toxicity. Here we report that 6-OH-BDE47 is acutely toxic in developing and adult zebrafish at concentrations in the nanomolar (nM) range. To identify possible mechanisms of toxicity, we used microarray analysis as a diagnostic tool. Zebrafish embryonic fibroblast (PAC2) cells were exposed to 6-OH-BDE47, BDE47, and the methoxylated metabolite 6-MeO-BDE47. These experiments revealed that 6-OH-BDE47 alters the expression of genes involved in proton transport and carbohydrate metabolism. These findings, combined with the acute toxicity, suggested that 6-OH-BDE47 causes disruption of oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS).Therefore, we further investigated the effect of 6-OH-BDE47 on OXPHOS in zebrafish mitochondria. Results show unequivocally that this compound is a potent uncoupler of OXPHOS and is an inhibitor of complex II of the electron transport chain. This study provides the first evidence of the in vivo toxicity and an important potential mechanism of toxicity of an environmentally relevant phenolic PBDE of both anthropogenic and natural origin. The results of this study emphasize the need for further investigation on the presence and toxicity of this class of polybrominated compounds.     

Efficiency of the Polymerase Chain Reaction

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has found wide application in biochemistry and molecular biology such as gene expression studies, mutation detection, forensic analysis and pathogen detection. Increasingly quantitative real time PCR is used to assess copy numbers from overall yield. In this study the yield is analyzed as a function of several processes: (1) thermal damage of the template and polymerase occurs during the denaturing step, (2) competition exists between primers and templates to either anneal or form dsDNA, (3) polymerase binding to annealed products (primer/ssDNA) to form ternary complexes and (4) extension of ternary complexes. Explicit expressions are provided for the efficiency of each process, therefore reaction conditions can be directly linked to the overall yield. Examples are provided where different processes play the yield-limiting role. The analysis will give researchers a unique understanding of the factors that control the reaction and will aid in the interpretation of experimental results.     

Rights and the City: An Exploration of the Interaction Between Socio-economic Rights and the City

In a rapidly urbanising society and against a background of rural underdevelopment, cities are increasingly the locations for access to basic socio-economic amenities and essential services. Access to the city and everything that it offers therefore impacts profoundly on the manner and extent to which poor and marginalised persons access the objects of their constitutionally ensconced socio-economic rights. Conversely, the content of the ??right to the city?? is impacted by legal understandings of the ambit, scope and enforceability of socio-economic rights. Either way, the South African Constitution??s entrenchment of rights to access water, housing, health care services and education, alongside its guarantee of a substantive right to equality, mean that urban design, policy making and regeneration processes have become increasingly legalized and will increasingly be tested for constitutional compliance, especially in instances where they have the effect of excluding poor and marginalised persons from the city. This article begins to unpack the interrelationship between constitutional rights and the right to the city, focusing specifically on the impact of rights-based litigation and judgements on urban policy making, design and regeneration in South Africa.     

Blurring boundaries: Fragments of an urban research agenda

Conclusion The boundary identified by Robinson between ‘urbanism’ and ‘developmental-ism’ will not be eliminated overnight. South African urban studies in all its hues are probably too set in its ways to make room for the kinds of imagining proposed in this paper. However, there are signs that scholars and artists in other fields will simply drag the ‘multiplex’ dynamics of everyday urbanism to the front door, forcing recalcitrants to take notice. For instance, the flood of fiction and cultural studies on the city by authors like Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe, Ashraf Jamal, Gabeba Baderoon, Dominique Malaquais, Ntone Edjabe, Sarah Nuttal, amongst many others, is rising surreptitiously behind the backs of scholars, biding time. The immediate challenge is to create spaces for cross-disciplinary dialogues and exchanges, which may eventually lead to trans-disciplinary practices to capture the elusive South African urbanism in all its starkness, impervious to desire or redemption. This paper was originally read at: the South African Geography Conference, University of the Western Cape, 7–9 September 2005. I have kept the presentation format of the written version to avoid disturbing the narrative flow of the paper. I am indebted to Sue Parnell and Vanessa Watson for an ongoing conversation about urban research questions and possibilities which have found its way into the arguments that follow. I obviously remain solely responsible for what is written here.     

A test of motor (not executive) planning in developmental coordination disorder and autism.

Grip selection tasks have been used to test “planning” in both autism and developmental coordination disorder (DCD). We differentiate between motor and executive planning and present a modified motor planning task. Participants grasped a cylinder in 1 of 2 orientations before turning it clockwise or anticlockwise. The rotation resulted in a comfortable final posture at the cost of a harder initial reaching action on 50% of trials. We hypothesized that grip selection would be dominated by motoric developmental status. Adults were always biased towards a comfortable end-state with their dominant hand, but occasionally ended uncomfortably with their nondominant hand. Most 9- to 14-year-olds with and without autism also showed this “end-state comfort” bias but only 50% of 5- to 8-year-olds. In contrast, children with DCD were biased towards selecting the simplest initial movement. Our results are best understood in terms of motor planning, with selection of an easier initial grip resulting from poor reach-to-grasp control rather than an executive planning deficit. The absence of differences between autism and controls may reflect the low demand this particular task places on executive planning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)