Bioactive compounds in rye flours with different extraction rates

Rye flours with extraction rate of 100% (wholemeal flour), 95% (brown flour), 90% (brown flour) and 70% (light flour) were prepared in order to study the relation between flour extraction rates and content of bioactive compounds. The following compounds were analysed: total phenolic compounds (TPC), total flavonoids (TF), inositol hexaphosphate (IP6), reduced (GSH) and oxidized (GSSG) glutathione, tocopherols (T) and tocotrienols (T3). The reduced/oxidized glutathione status (GSH/GSSG) of the flours was examined as a potential index of flour resistance against oxidative stress. The following observations were made in relation to the flour extraction rates and bioactive compounds contents: (a) milling process caused decrease in content in TPC, TF, IP6, GSH and GSSG, T and T3, (b) the most resistant against oxidation processes were suggested a brown flours, then light and finally wholemeal flour, (c) the ratio of tocotrienols to tocopherols (T3/T) was the highest in rye flours with extraction rate of 100–90% whereas light flour was the poorest source of tocopherols and tocotrienols. The provided data support current trend to increase number of rye products from wholemeal or brown flours.     

Nonenzymatic browning induced by gamma-irradiation in model system Part IV. Three components system consisting of fructose, alanine and phenylalanine

Summary The effect of irradiation on the nonenzymatic browning reaction in the model system consisting of 0,03M-fructose, 0.01M-alanine and 0.01M-phenylalanine in aqueous solution was investigated. The loss of phenylalanine and fructose after irradiation, due to their high reactivity towards radical species of water radiolysis was greater compared with alanine. The heating of preirradiated solution caused only a slight decrease in the concentration of substrates. The characteristic absorption spectra for only irradiated and for irradiated and heated solutions were recorded. The heating produced a chromophore with a broadened absorption maximum about 285 nm. Two unidentified Amadori type compounds which gave positive response to ninhydrin were found by amino-acid analysis.

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Durch -Strahlung induzierte nichtenzymatische Bräunung im Modell-System Teil IV. Dreikomponentenmodellsystem aus Fructose, Alanin und Phenylalanin

Zusammenfassung Es wurde der Einfluß von -Strahlen auf die nichtenzymatische Bräunung im Dreikomponenten-Modellsystem, bestehend aus 0,03m-Fructose, 0,01m-Alanin und 0,01m-Phenylalanin in wäßriger Lösung untersucht. Der Verlust an Phenylalanin und Fructose nach der Bestrahlung war größer als bei Alanin wegen dessen größerer Reaktivität zu den Radikalen der Wasserradiolyse. Beim Erhitzen von bestrahlten Losungen wurde eine Abnahme in der Konzentration von Substraten beobachtet. Es wurden die charakteristischen Absorptionsspektren von lediglich bestrahlten und von bestrahlten und gleichzeitig erhitzten Lösungen aufgenommen. Beim Erhitzen wird ein Chromophor mit breitem Absorptionsmaximum bei ungefähr 285 nm, gebildet. Es wurden zwei nichtidentifizierte Amadoriprodukte mit positiver Ninhydrin-Reaktion bei den Aminosäureanalysen gefunden.

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For part 3 see [8]     

Role of HMOX1 Promoter Genetic Variants in Chemoresistance and Chemotherapy Induced Neutropenia in Children with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Whilst the survival rates of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) have increased remarkably over the last decades, the therapy resistance and toxicity are still the major causes of treatment failure. It was shown that overexpression of heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) promotes proliferation and chemoresistance of cancer cells. In humans, the HO-1 gene (HMOX1) expression is modulated by two polymorphisms in the promoter region: (GT)n-length polymorphism and single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) A(−413)T, with short GT repeat sequences and 413-A variants linked to an increased HO-1 inducibility. We found that the short alleles are significantly more frequent in ALL patients in comparison to the control group, and that their presence may be associated with a higher risk of treatment failure, reflecting the role of HO-1 in chemoresistance. We also observed that the presence of short alleles may predispose to develop chemotherapy-induced neutropenia. In case of SNP, the 413-T variant co-segregated with short or long alleles, while 413-A almost selectively co-segregated with long alleles, hence it is not possible to determine if SNPs are actually of phenotypic significance. Our results suggest that HO-1 can be a potential target to overcome the treatment failure in ALL patients.     

Early-Life Development of the Bifidobacterial Community in the Infant Gut

The establishment of the gut microbiota poses implications for short and long-term health. Bifidobacterium is an important taxon in early life, being one of the most abundant genera in the infant intestinal microbiota and carrying out key functions for maintaining host-homeostasis. Recent metagenomic studies have shown that different factors, such as gestational age, delivery mode, or feeding habits, affect the gut microbiota establishment at high phylogenetic levels. However, their impact on the specific bifidobacterial populations is not yet well understood. Here we studied the impact of these factors on the different Bifidobacterium species and subspecies at both the quantitative and qualitative levels. Fecal samples were taken from 85 neonates at 2, 10, 30, 90 days of life, and the relative proportions of the different bifidobacterial populations were assessed by 16S rRNA–23S rRNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region sequencing. Absolute levels of the main species were determined by q-PCR. Our results showed that the bifidobacterial population establishment is affected by gestational age, delivery mode, and infant feeding, as it is evidenced by qualitative and quantitative changes. These data underline the need for understanding the impact of perinatal factors on the gut microbiota also at low taxonomic levels, especially in the case of relevant microbial populations such as Bifidobacterium. The data obtained provide indications for the selection of the species best suited for the development of bifidobacteria-based products for different groups of neonates and will help to develop rational strategies for favoring a healthy early microbiota development when this process is challenged.     

Effect of coumarin and xanthotoxin on mitochondrial structure,oxygen uptake,and succinate dehydrogenase activity in onion root cells

At concentrations in which they occur on the plant surface and retard mitosis, coumarin and xanthotoxin lowered uptake of oxygen (by 60 and 30%, respectively) by meristematic cells ofAllium cepa root tips. They caused changes in the structure of the mitochondrial matrix to become dense, and protrusions of mitochondrial membranes were visible parallelling their hypertrophy, indicating alteration in the structure and physiology of these organelles. Coumarin and, to a lesser extent, xanthotoxin increased succinate dehydrogenase production in mitochondria and also in the cytoplasm, indicating changes in membrane permeability. Changes in oxygen uptake and mitochondrial structure, in addition to the retardation of mitosis, may be the reason these compounds act as allelochemicals after they have been removed from the plant surface and reach the root meristem.     

Detecting Fixed Patterns in Chordal Graphs in Polynomial Time

The Contractibility problem takes as input two graphs G and H, and the task is to decide whether H can be obtained from G by a sequence of edge contractions. The Induced Minor and Induced Topological Minor problems are similar, but the first allows both edge contractions and vertex deletions, whereas the latter allows only vertex deletions and vertex dissolutions. All three problems are NP-complete, even for certain fixed graphs H. We show that these problems can be solved in polynomial time for every fixed H when the input graph G is chordal. Our results can be considered tight, since these problems are known to be W[1]-hard on chordal graphs when parameterized by the size of H. To solve Contractibility and Induced Minor, we define and use a generalization of the classic Disjoint Paths problem, where we require the vertices of each of the k paths to be chosen from a specified set. We prove that this variant is NP-complete even when k=2, but that it is polynomial-time solvable on chordal graphs for every fixed k. Our algorithm for Induced Topological Minor is based on another generalization of Disjoint Paths called Induced Disjoint Paths, where the vertices from different paths may no longer be adjacent. We show that this problem, which is known to be NP-complete when k=2, can be solved in polynomial time on chordal graphs even when k is part of the input. Our results fit into the general framework of graph containment problems, where the aim is to decide whether a graph can be modified into another graph by a sequence of specified graph operations. Allowing combinations of the four well-known operations edge deletion, edge contraction, vertex deletion, and vertex dissolution results in the following ten containment relations: (induced) minor, (induced) topological minor, (induced) subgraph, (induced) spanning subgraph, dissolution, and contraction. Our results, combined with existing results, settle the complexity of each of the ten corresponding containment problems on chordal graphs.     

Selective oxidation of ammonia to nitrogen on transition metal containing mixed metal oxides

The selective catalytic oxidation of ammonia to nitrogen (NH₃-SCO) has been studied over hydrotalcite derived mixed metal oxides containing Cu, Co, Fe or Ni. XRD, BET, NH₃-TPD and TPR techniques were used for catalysts characterization. Results of NH₃-SCO were compared with those of selective catalytic reduction of NO with NH₃ (NO-SCR). Reaction mechanism was studied by temperature-programmed surface reaction (TPSR) and activity tests with a various contact time. Catalytic performance of the studied samples depends on both kind and loading of transition metals in the mixed metal oxide system. The Cu-containing samples have been found to be the most active catalysts of the NH₃-SCO process. Transition metal loading strongly influences distribution of ammonia oxidation products. The highest selectivity to N₂ was measured for the catalysts with the lowest transition metal content.     

Deciding k-Colorability of P 5-Free Graphs in Polynomial Time

The problem of computing the chromatic number of a P ₅-free graph (a graph which contains no path on 5 vertices as an induced subgraph) is known to be NP-hard. However, we show that for every fixed integer k, there exists a polynomial-time algorithm determining whether or not a P ₅-free graph admits a k-coloring, and finding one, if it does.     

Vocal-based emotion recognition using random forests and decision tree

This paper proposes a new vocal-based emotion recognition method using random forests, where pairs of the features on the whole speech signal, namely, pitch, intensity, the first four formants, the first four formants bandwidths, mean autocorrelation, mean noise-to-harmonics ratio and standard deviation, are used in order to recognize the emotional state of a speaker. The proposed technique adopts random forests to represent the speech signals, along with the decision-trees approach, in order to classify them into different categories. The emotions are broadly categorised into the six groups, which are happiness, fear, sadness, neutral, surprise, and disgust. The Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion database is used. According to the experimental results using leave-one-out cross-validation, by means of combining the most significant prosodic features, the proposed method has an average recognition rate of \(66.28\%\), and at the highest level, the recognition rate of \(78\%\) has been obtained, which belongs to the happiness voice signals. The proposed method has \(13.78\%\) higher average recognition rate and \(28.1\%\) higher best recognition rate compared to the linear discriminant analysis as well as \(6.58\%\) higher average recognition rate than the deep neural networks results, both of which have been implemented on the same database.     

On Constructing Unit Triangular Matrices with Prescribed Singular Values

We propose an efficient algorithm for computing a unit lower triangular n×n matrix with prescribed singular values of O(n ²) cost. This is a solution of the question raised by N. J. Higham in [4, Problem 26.3, p. 528]. Received July 21, 1999; revised November 4, 1999