Effect of germination on the nitrogenous constituents,protein fractions, in vitro digestibility and antinutritional factors of fenugreek seeds (trigonella foenum graecum L.)

This study was designed to determine the effect of germination on nitrogenous constituents, protein fractions, in vitro digestibility and antinutritional factors (namely trypsin inhibitor and haemagglutinin) of the Egyptian fenugreek seeds Geiza 2 variety. After 96 h of germination, there was 18% decrease in the dry weight of seeds, a slight increase of total nitrogen (TN), a decrease of protein nitrogen (PN) and a marked increase of both non-protein nitrogen (NPN) and free amino acid nitrogen (FAAN). Non-protein nitrogen other than FAAN, amido nitrogen and ammonia nitrogen also increased. The protein fractions (namely albumin, globulin, prolamin and glutelin) were separated according to their solubilities in different solvents. The ratio between the four protein fractions in ungerminated seeds was 4:3.5:2.8:1 and became 2:6.5:7.7:1 after germination as calculated on the basis of their PN.Trypsin inhibitor activity per gramme of fenugreek was found to be higher by 66% in germinated fenugreek than ungerminated seeds. Both ungerminated and germinated fenugreek was found devoid of the haemagglutinin activity.Germination resulted in a slight increase in pancreatic digestibility, 33.7% decrease in digestibility by pepsin followed by pancreatin, while a small decrease was found in peptic digestibility.     

Proteolytic activity,amino acid composition and protein quality of germinating fenugreek seeds (Trigonella foenum graecum L.)

This study determined the changes in proteolytic activity and trypsin inhibitor, due to germination for 120 h, and their relationships to amino acid content and protein quality. The activities of cas-ase, Hb-ase, and BAPA-ase, as well as the trypsin inhibitor of the fenugreek, increased as germination proceeded. Glutamic and aspartic acids were the richest amino acids in fenugreek seeds, followed by leucine, arginine, lysine and proline. After germination, the contents of aspartic acid, phenylalanine, tyrosine, threonine, tryptophan and valine increased, while those of glutamic acid, proline and four of the essential amino acids decreased. All the free amino acids increased after germination, while glycine decreased. Cystine, tryptophan and proline originated in a free form after germination. The chemical score, based on the essential amino acid pattern of whole egg protein, for fenugreek seeds, showed a marked decrease (21%) after germination. The in vitro pepsin, followed by pancreatin digestion, showed a slight increase for the germinated seeds. Germination of seeds lowered the C-PER, a result which indicates that the protein quality decreased.     

A perceptual metric for stereoscopic image quality assessment based on the binocular energy

Stereoscopic imaging is becoming very popular and its deployment by means of photography, television, cinema. . .is rapidly increasing. Obviously, the access to this type of images imposes the use of compression and transmission that may generate artifacts of different natures. Consequently, it is important to have appropriate tools to measure the quality of stereoscopic content. Several studies tried to extend well-known metrics, such as the PSNR or SSIM, to 3D. However, the results are not as good as for 2D images and it becomes important to have metrics dealing with 3D perception. In this work, we propose a full reference metric for quality assessment of stereoscopic images based on the binocular fusion process characterizing the 3D human perception. The main idea consists of the development of a model allowing to reproduce the binocular signal generated by simple and complex cells, and to estimate the associated binocular energy. The difference of binocular energy has shown a high correlation with the human judgement for different impairments and is used to build the Binocular Energy Quality Metric (BEQM). Extensive experiments demonstrated the performance of the BEQM with regards to literature.     

Microstructure and microtexture evolution with aging treatment in an Al–Mg–Si alloy severely deformed by HPT

Experiments were conducted on an Al–0.6 % Mg–0.4 % Si alloy to evaluate the effect of different preliminary thermal treatments on the evolution of microstructure and microtexture during processing by High-Pressure Torsion (HPT). Disks of the alloy were solution-treated, then some disks were briefly aged at 473 K, and other disks were briefly aged at 523 K before processing by HPT for up to 20 complete revolutions. The processing by HPT refined the microstructure to an average grain size as small as ~0.25 μm in the solution-treated alloy after 20 turns but preliminary aging led to slightly larger average grain sizes of ~0.35–0.40 μm after 20 turns. For all processing conditions, there was a high fraction of high-angle grain boundaries after HPT and it is shown that aging introduces changes in the microtexture intensities.     

Chemical composition of wild mushrooms collected from Alexandria,Egypt

Fourteen samples of wild mushrooms, collected during the wintertime, were identified as Agaricus campestris, Agaricus rodmani and Collybia sp. Moisture, crude protein, non-protein nitrogen, ether extract, total carbohydrates, crude fibre, vitamin C, ash and minerals (calcium, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, iron, copper and manganese) were determined. In addition, reducing sugars, non-reducing sugars, starch, glycogen and mannitol were determined. Variations in chemical constituents were found to be due to stage of development and type of mushroom.The different types of wild mushroom had similar distributions of amino acids. They contained all the essential amino acids in varying amounts.     

Changes in carbohydrates of germinating fenugreek seeds (Trigonella foenum graecum L.)

The effect of germination at 25 °C for 96 h in the dark on the carbohydrates of fenugreek seed was investigated. Reducing, total reducing, non-reducing sugar, and pentosan contents increased. Polysaccharides estimated as starch decreased. Fenugreek contained mucilage (18%), which decreased considerably during germination. The decline in mucilage content was accompanied by a drop in galactan content. Total pectic content did not change, but there was a decline in the high methoxy pectin content, while protopectin, and the low methoxy pectate salts of calcium and magnesium increased. The 70% ethanol soluble carboydrates were chromatographically determined. Fenugreek seeds contained sucrose, raffinose, stachyose, and an unidentified sugar ( I ). A marked increase in sucrose content was observed after germination. Raffinose, stachyose and the unknown sugar ( I ) decreased, while another unknown ( II ) appeared. The two unknown sugars may be members of the raffinose family. Maltose and fructose appeared in measurable amounts after germination.     

Decision Making with Second‐Order Imprecise Probabilities

In decision analysis, uncertainty is usually described in the framework of probability. However, a large number of experimental and theoretical studies showed that a single nature of probability does not accurately capture human preferences. To avoid this drawback, they use imprecise probabilities. But, as decision maker is usually uncertain about first‐order imprecise probabilities, imprecise hierarchical probability models are used. For most of such models, the second levels are precise. There also exist studies on two‐level imprecise hierarchical models, which use imprecise probabilities or possibilities at the second level. Most of these works are based on lower prevision theory leading to a large number of optimization problems. In the present paper, we propose an imprecise hierarchical decision‐making model where the first and the second level are described by interval probabilities. The method associates with the construction of a nonadditive measure as a lower prevision and uses this capacity in Choquet integral for constructing a utility function.     

A novel sub-band adaptive filtering for acoustic echo cancellation based on empirical mode decomposition algorithm

Acoustic echo cancellation is one of the most severe requirements in hands-free telephone and teleconference communication. This paper proposes an Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD)-based sub-band adaptive filtering structure, which applies the EMD-based algorithm dealing with the far-end speech signal and the microphone output to obtain two sets of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). In addition, each IMF set is separated into different bands based on the power spectral density (PSD) of every IMF. Experiment signals were collected from a medium-size office room and simulations were taken under different conditions by three types of EMD-based algorithms. Results show that the proposed structure is able to model the transfer function of the unknown environment and track the change of the room much faster than the normalized adaptive filtering structure. The ensemble EMD (EEMD) algorithm and the noise-modulated EMD (NEMD) are proved to have better performance than the EMD algorithm in terms of echo return loss enhancement.