Quantitative aspects of two methods to dissolve collagen-free muscle proteins from acetone dry powders of Guelders ring sausage

Summary The purpose of this study was to find experimental conditions for the complete solubility of collagen-free muscle proteins (CFMP) using acetone powder of Guelders ring sausage. Preliminary experiments were carried out to choose the best procedure for preparing the acetone dry powder. Two different methods of acetone extraction of minced sausage were compared. The acetone dry mass (ADM) method using continuous extraction in a Soxhlet [2] apparatus gave better results than the acetone powder (ACP) method, which used a blender [1]. The ADM method was used for further investigations. ADM was extracted with two types of sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS), containing solvents A and B. Solvent A contains a Tris-boric acid buffer (pH 8.2) with 1.5% (m/v) SDS and 0.05% (m/v) dithioerythreitol [3]. Solvent B is a borate-chloric acid buffer (pH 9.0) with 2.0% (m/v) SDS and 1.0% (m/v) mercapto-ethanol [2]. Both solvents showed a linear relationship between the quantities of CFMP in ADM and the dissolved CFMP. The linear relationships were found between quantities of 10.0 and 30.0 mg (solution A) and of 5.0 and 30.0 mg ADM (solution B) per ml solvent. The solubility of CFMP was better in solvent B than in solution A. Completely dissolved CFMP from ADM was only obtained in the case of 5.0 mg ADM in 1.0 ml solution B. These conditions will be used in liquid chromatography experiments, the results of which will be reported later.

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Quantitative Aspekte zweier Verfahren für das Auflösen kollagenfreier Muskelproteine aus acetontrockenen Pulvern der Gelderschen Rauchwurst

Zusammenfassung Der Zweck dieser Untersuchungen ist, die experimentellen Bedingungen für die vollstän-dige Löslichkeit des kollagenfreien Muskelproteins (CFMP) aus dem Acetonpulver der Gelderschen Rauchwurst zu finden. Durch Vorversuche wurde die beste Arbeitsweise für das Zubereiten des Acetonpulvers gewählt. Zwei verschiedene Extraktionsverfahren mit zerkleinertem Wurstmaterial wurden miteinander verglichen. Die Methode mit der Acetontrockenmasse (ADM) mittels kontinuierlicher Extraktion [2] führte zu besseren Ergebnissen als die Methode mit Acetonpulver (ACP), wozu ein Mischgerät [1] verwendet wurde. Die ADM-Methode wurde für weitere Untersuchungen angewendet. ADM wurde mit zwei verschiedenen Extraktionslösungen von Natrium-Dodecylsulfat (SDS) (A und B) extrahiert. Lösung A enthalt einen Tris-Borsäure Puffer (pH 8,2) mit SDS (1,5%) und Dithioerithritol (0,05%) [3]. Die Lösung B enthält einen Borat-Salzsäure Puffer (pH 9,0) mit SDS (2,0%) und Mercapto-Ethanol (1,0%) [2]. Beide Extraktionslösungen zeigen ein lineares Verhalten zwischen den Mengen vom CFMP in ADM und in aufgelöstem CFMP. Diese Linearität wurde von 10,030,0 mg ADM (Lösungsmittel A) und von 5,030,0 mg ADM (Lösungsmittel B) gefunden. Die Lös-lichkeit in Lösung B ist gegeniiber Lösung A besser. Ein vollständig gelöstes CFMP aus ADM wurde nur bei der Extraktion von 5,0 mg ADM in 1,0 ml der Losung B erhalten. Diese Bedingung soll in unseren künftigen flüssigchromatographischen Experimenten verwendet werden.

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Supported by a grant from the Hoofdinspectie Levensmiddelen of the Ministry of Welzijn, Volksgezondheid en Cultuur     

Expert judgement on the long term possibilities of conventional emission abatement technologies for passenger cars

Topics in Catalysis - This paper presents the results of a quantitatively substantiated “expert judgement” concerning the potential for further reduction of the exhaust emissions of...     

Learning about the opponent in automated bilateral negotiation: a comprehensive survey of opponent modeling techniques

A negotiation between agents is typically an incomplete information game, where the agents initially do not know their opponent’s preferences or strategy. This poses a challenge, as efficient and effective negotiation requires the bidding agent to take the other’s wishes and future behavior into account when deciding on a proposal. Therefore, in order to reach better and earlier agreements, an agent can apply learning techniques to construct a model of the opponent. There is a mature body of research in negotiation that focuses on modeling the opponent, but there exists no recent survey of commonly used opponent modeling techniques. This work aims to advance and integrate knowledge of the field by providing a comprehensive survey of currently existing opponent models in a bilateral negotiation setting. We discuss all possible ways opponent modeling has been used to benefit agents so far, and we introduce a taxonomy of currently existing opponent models based on their underlying learning techniques. We also present techniques to measure the success of opponent models and provide guidelines for deciding on the appropriate performance measures for every opponent model type in our taxonomy.     

Network trust management in emergency situations

We study the unique trust management, and more precisely reputation management and revocation of malicious nodes in the context of ad hoc networks used for emergency communications.Unlike in centralized systems, reputation management and revocation in ad hoc networks is non-trivial. This difficulty is due to the fact that the nodes have to collaboratively calculate the reputation value of a particular node and then revoke the node if the reputation value goes below a threshold. A major challenge in this scheme is to prevent a malicious node from discrediting other genuine nodes. The decision to revoke a node has to be communicated to all the nodes of the network. In traditional ad hoc networks the overhead of broadcasting the message throughout the network may be very high. We solve the problem of reputation management and node revocation in ad hoc networks of cell phones by using a threshold cryptography based scheme. Each node of the network would have a set of anonymous referees, which would store the reputation information of the node and issue reputation certificates to the node with timestamps. The misbehavior of a particular cell phone is reported to its anonymous referees, who issue certificates which reflect the positive and negative recommendations.     

What can the canonical controller in principle tell us?

Given a plant and a desired specification our goal is to construct a controller system which, when interconnected with the plant, yields a system that behaves like the desired specification. We can always construct the canonical controller introduced in van der Schaft (2003) [10]. For linear systems there exists a controller which when interconnected to the plant yields the desired behaviour if and only if the canonical controller is itself one such controller, see Vinjamoor and van der Schaft (2011) [4]. In this paper we extend this result to nonlinear systems. It turns out that one has to look at the canonical controller together with its subsystems. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a controller for a class of nonlinear systems. We end with examples which show that in certain cases looking at subsystems of the canonical controller also does not suffice.     

A Reusable Multi-Agent Architecture for Active Intelligent Websites

In this paper a reusable multi-agent architecture for intelligent Websites is presented and illustrated for an electronic department store. The architecture has been designed and implemented using the compositional design method for multi-agent systems DESIRE. The agents within this architecture are based on a generic information broker agent model. It is shown how the architecture can be exploited to design an intelligent Website for insurance, developed in co-operation with the software company Ordina Utopics and an insurance company.     

A web-based e-learning system for increasing study efficiency by stimulating learner’s motivation

Due to the opportunities provided by the Internet, more and more people are taking advantage of distance learning courses and during the last few years enormous research efforts have been dedicated to the development of distance learning systems. So far, many e-learning systems are proposed and used practically. However, in these systems the e-learning completion rate is about 30%. One of the reasons is the low study desire when the learner studies the learning materials. In this research, we propose an interactive Web-based e-learning system. The purpose of our system is to increase the e-learning completion rate by stimulating learner’s motivation. The proposed system has three subsystems: the learning subsystem, learner support subsystem, and teacher support subsystem. The learning subsystem improves the learner’s study desire. The learner support subsystem supports the learner during the study, and the teacher support subsystem supports the teacher to get the learner’s study state. To evaluate the proposed system, we developed several experiments and surveys. By using new features such as: display of learner’s study history, change of interface color, encourage function, ranking function, self-determination of the study materials, and grouping of learners, the proposed system can increase the learning efficiency.