Identification and antibiotic resistance of Lactobacilli isolated from raw cow’s milk of Oujda City (Morocco)

In this study, a Lactobacillus strain was isolated from raw cow milk. It was tentatively identified at the species level according to its carbohydrate fermentation profile and phenotype characteristics as Lactobacillus paracasei KSNM. The susceptibility of the identified Lactobacillus to 23 antibiotics was performed using the disc diffusion testing method. Inhibition zone diameters were measured and expressed in terms of sensitive, intermediate or resistant. KSNM strain was sensitive toward; amoxicillin, ampicillin, amoxyclav (amoxicillin + clavulanic acid), tetracycline, macrolides, sulfamides/trimethoprim, and rifampicin. But, it expressed intermediate sensitivity toward; cefamandole, cefaclor, and cephalothin. However, it was resistant to penicillin G, aminoglycosides, quinolones, ciprofloxacin, lincomycin, nitroxolin, and a large number of cephalosporins, which included cefoxitin, cefotaxime, and ceftriaxone.     

Personalized video adaptation framework (PIAF): high-level semantic adaptation

Despite much work on Universal Multimedia Experience (UME), existing video adaptation approaches cannot yet be considered as truly user-centric, mostly due to their poor handling of semantic user preferences. Indeed, these works mainly concentrate on lower-level user preferences but do neither consider any fine-grained object-level adaptation nor evaluate different adaptation options based on predicted user expectations. Moreover, these works do not provide owners with property rights that enable them to place restrictions on the types of modifications to be made to the video content. To address these shortcomings, we propose the Personalized vIdeo Adaptation Framework (PIAF) for high-level semantic video adaptation. PIAF is a fully integrated framework providing all the requirements for a semantic video adaptation. It defines a video annotation model and a user profile model comprising semantic constraints that are delineated in a consistent way, based on the standards MPEG-7 and MPEG-21. At the heart of the framework, the Adaptation Decision Taking Engine (ADTE) computes utility values for different adaptation options, considering each shot separately. The corresponding utility function evaluates the possible choices by evaluating multiple parameters that capture different dimensions of a multimedia experience: amount of modified content, modifications to key objects and shots with respect to the semantic integrity of the original content, expected processing cost of the adaptation, and the anticipated visual and temporal quality of the adapted content. Furthermore, the ADTE can deal with intellectual property issues by selecting an adaptation plan of good quality that also satisfies constraints specified by the content owner. This paper places a significant emphasis on theoretical details of the utility function and the computation of the adaptation plan. It also presents the results and evaluation of the adaptation process both in simulation and user study.     

Physico-chemical and microbiological characteristics of a dried salted meat product (Kaddid) in Morocco

Samples of traditional Kaddid (a salted dried meat) were analysed for their microbiological and physicochemical characteristics. Microbiological determinations included the Standard Plate Count (SPC), total and faecal coliforms, enterococci, staphylococci,Salmonella, Clostridium, andPseudomonas, whereas physico-chemical properties were characterized by pH, aw, chlorides, total nitrogen (TN), non-protein nitrogen (NPN), total volatile nitrogen (TVN), fat content and the acid degree value (ADV). Results showed that the microbial profiles were high for all the micro-organisms studied. Staphylococci were the most abundant micro-organisms in the product, whereasSalmonella was not detected in any sample. Proteolytics and lipolytics were also present in high numbers. The physico-chemical characteristics showed high levels of the ADV, chlorides, NPN and the TVN, and low levels of the aw and humidity. The conditions established in Kaddid indicate that there is effective preservation against micro-organisms causing spoilage and/or which are hazardous. The physico-chemical characteristics may indicate a high level of lipolysis and a low level of proteolysis.     

Staphylococcus aureus nasal carriage in a Moroccan dialysis center and isolates characterization

Staphylococcus aureus, which has its ecological niche in the anterior nares, has been shown to cause a variety of infectious diseases mainly for patients in hemodialysis units. We performed this study to evaluate the prevalence of nasal S. aureus carriage among hemodialysis outpatients, to determine the antimicrobial susceptibility of isolates, to characterize the virulence genes, and to identify associated risk factors. Nares swab specimens were obtained from 70 outpatients on hemodialysis between March and June 2010. Samples were plated immediately onto S. aureus specific media and pattern of antibacterial sensitivity was determined using disk diffusion method. Polymerase chain reaction was used to detect nuc, mecA, and genes encoding staphylococcal toxins. Medical record of patients was explored to determine S.aureus carriage risk factors. Nasal screening identified 42.9% S. aureus carriers with only one (3.3%) methicillin‐resistant S. aureus isolate. Among the methicillin‐susceptible S. aureus isolates, high rate of penicillin resistance (81.8%) has been detected. The identified risk factors were male gender and age ≤ 30 years. Research of virulence factors showed a high genetic diversity among the 30 S. aureus isolates. Twenty‐one (70%) of them had at least one virulence gene, of which 3.3% were Panton‐Valentine leukocidin (lukS/F‐PV) genes. S. aureus carriage must be screened for at regular intervals in hemodialysis patients. Setting up a bacterial surveillance system is one of the strategies to understand the epidemiology of methicillin‐resistant S. aureus, to guide local antibiotic policy and prevent spread of antibiotic‐resistant S. aureus.     

Amélioration de la sensibilité de détection et de la qualité du radargramme d’un radar pénétrant GPR par une modulation micro-onde

The primary effect of the field continuously capted by aGpr is the production of a class which limits the contrast of the reflections on the targets. The target response becomes illegible sight the influence of certain disturbances which are due to the reflections caused by certain parasitic elements which are randomly distributed in the soil and the dispersion phenomenon. We present in this paper an approach based on a μ-wave modulation which allowed stage this problem. The technique suggested makes it possible to do a classification of capted signals. It will be shown that the frequency of modulation f_m must be higher than a cut-off frequency f_c which depends on the electric parameters of the ground. In a second part of this paper, we show how to improve quality of the radargram of a systemGpr by a simple convolution between the collected signal and a wavelet with a defined parameters.     

Synthesis of 9-deoxo-4'-deoxy-6,9-epoxyerythromycin derivatives: novel and acid-stable motilides

In our quest toward the discovery of highly potent and acid-stable motilides, novel 4"-deoxy derivatives of 9-deoxo-6, 9-epoxyerythromycin were designed, synthesized, and evaluated for their gastrointestinal prokinetic activities. These compounds, in their 9R configuration, were more potent than their 6,9-enol ether homologues in inducing well-coordinated smooth muscle contractions in an in vitro rabbit duodenal assay: e.g., (9R), (8S)-9-deoxo-4"-deoxy-3'-N-desmethyl-3'-N-ethyl-6, 9-epoxyerythromycin A (10) and (9R), (8S)-9-deoxo-4"-deoxy-3'-N-desmethyl-3'-N-ethanol-6, 9-epoxyerythromycin A (15) had a pED50 of 8.54 and 8.11 compared to a pED50 of 7.22 for compound 2 (ABT-229). Reduction of the 6,9-enol ether, which was aimed at improving the acid stability, afforded the most stable motilides to date with t1/2 of 5.5 h for 10 and 15. Compounds 10 and 15 bind specifically to rabbit antral smooth muscle motilin receptors with pIC50 values of 8.52 and 8.70.     

Semi-structured document categorization with a semantic kernel

Since a decade, text categorization has become an active field of research in the machine learning community. Most of the approaches are based on the term occurrence frequency. The performance of such surface-based methods can decrease when the texts are too complex, i.e., ambiguous. One alternative is to use the semantic-based approaches to process textual documents according to their meaning. Furthermore, research in text categorization has mainly focused on “flat texts” whereas many documents are now semi-structured and especially under the XML format. In this paper, we propose a semantic kernel for semi-structured biomedical documents. The semantic meanings of words are extracted using the unified medical language system (UMLS) framework. The kernel, with a SVM classifier, has been applied to a text categorization task on a medical corpus of free text documents. The results have shown that the semantic kernel outperforms the linear kernel and the naive Bayes classifier. Moreover, this kernel was ranked in the top 10 of the best algorithms among 44 classification methods at the 2007 Computational Medicine Center (CMC) Medical NLP International Challenge.     

Removal of Basic Red 46 dye from aqueous solution by adsorption onto Moroccan clay

In this study, Moroccan crude clay of Safi, which was characterized by X-ray diffraction, is used as adsorbent for the investigation of the adsorption kinetics, isotherms and thermodynamic parameters of the Basic Red 46 (BR46) in aqueous solutions at various dye concentrations, adsorbent masses and pH values. The results showed that the adsorption capacity of the dye increased by initial dye concentration and pH values. Two kinetic models (the pseudo-first-order and the pseudo-second-order) were used to calculate the adsorption rate constants. The adsorption kinetics of the basic dye followed pseudo-second-order model. The experimental data isotherms were analyzed using the Langmuir, Freundlich and Dubinin–Radushkevish equations. The monolayer adsorption capacity for BR46 dye is 54 mg/g of crude clay. Nearly 20 min of contact time was found to be sufficient for the dye adsorption to reach equilibrium. Thermodynamical parameters were also evaluated for the dye–adsorbent system and revealed that the adsorption process is exothermic in nature.