Tools to integrate organoleptic quality criteria into breeding programs

This technical booklet provides methodologies and guidance to implement sensory evaluations for organoleptic quality assessment in multi-actor-projects for organic agriculture. It presents five detailed tests that can be used in sensory evaluation, methodologies on how to prepare the samples and a glossary. This booklet has been developed under Solibam project and updated during Diversifood project

Model-driven development of data intensive applications over cloud resources

The proliferation of sensors over the last years has generated large amounts of raw data, forming data streams that need to be processed. In many cases, cloud resources are used for such processing, exploiting their flexibility, but these sensor streaming applications often need to support operational and control actions that have real-time and low-latency requirements that go beyond the cost effective and flexible solutions supported by existing cloud frameworks, such as Apache Kafka, Apache Spark Streaming, or Map-Reduce Streams. In this paper, we describe a model-driven and stepwise refinement methodological approach for streaming applications executed over clouds. The central role is assigned to a set of Petri Net models for specifying functional and non-functional requirements. They support model reuse, and a way to combine formal analysis, simulation, and approximate computation of minimal and maximal boundaries of non-functional requirements when the problem is either mathematically or computationally intractable. We show how our proposal can assist developers in their design and implementation decisions from a performance perspective. Our methodology allows to conduct performance analysis: The methodology is intended for all the engineering process stages, and we can (i) analyse how it can be mapped onto cloud resources, and (ii) obtain key performance indicators, including throughput or economic cost, so that developers are assisted in their development tasks and in their decision taking. In order to illustrate our approach, we make use of the pipelined wavefront array

Model-driven development of data intensive applications over cloud resources

The proliferation of sensors over the last years has generated large amounts of raw data, forming data streams that need to be processed. In many cases, cloud resources are used for such processing, exploiting their flexibility, but these sensor streaming applications often need to support operational and control actions that have real-time and low-latency requirements that go beyond the cost effective and flexible solutions supported by existing cloud frameworks, such as Apache Kafka, Apache Spark Streaming, or Map-Reduce Streams. In this paper, we describe a model-driven and stepwise refinement methodological approach for streaming applications executed over clouds. The central role is assigned to a set of Petri Net models for specifying functional and non-functional requirements. They support model reuse, and a way to combine formal analysis, simulation, and approximate computation of minimal and maximal boundaries of non-functional requirements when the problem is either mathematically or computationally intractable. We show how our proposal can assist developers in their design and implementation decisions from a performance perspective. Our methodology allows to conduct performance analysis: The methodology is intended for all the engineering process stages, and we can (i) analyse how it can be mapped onto cloud resources, and (ii) obtain key performance indicators, including throughput or economic cost, so that developers are assisted in their development tasks and in their decision taking. In order to illustrate our approach, we make use of the pipelined wavefront array.Comment: Preprin

E-Cadherin Force Transmission and Stiffness Sensing

E-cadherin is the chief mediator of cell-cell adhesion between epithelial cells and is a known mechanosensor. Force transmission and stiffness sensing are two crucial aspects of E-cadherin mechanobiology. E-cadherin has an extracellular adhesive region, a transmembrane region and an intracellular region that binds to adhesion-associated proteins. Here, we assessed how different factors affect the level of force transmission (i) from inside the cell such as adhesion-associated proteins, (ii) on the cell membrane, such as growth factor receptors and (iii) outside the cell, such as different binding partners in adhesion. To study the level of force transmission inside the cell, we studied the role of vinculin and α-catenin in transmitting endogenous forces at cell-cell contacts. We found that vinculin, not α-catenin, is pivotal for transmitting high endogenous forces at cell-cell contacts through E-cadherin. To study how the level of force transmission is affected by factors on the cell membrane, we investigated the effect of EGFR on the intercellular forces transmitted at cell-cell contacts. We found that EGFR activity significantly affects the level of intercellular forces. In order to understand how the level of force transmission depends on binding partners from outside the cell, we studied homophilic and heterophilic interactions of cadherins. We found that the intercellular tension for the heterophilic E-cad/N-cad interaction is higher than the homophilic E-cad/E-cad interaction. Additionally, we also devised a modified traction force microscopy method using a novel, simple strategy for coincident immunofluorescence and traction force microscopy. Moreover, E-cadherin adhesions reside in a microenvironment that is comprised of adjacent epithelial cells. We found that E-cadherin adhesions change their organization depending on the magnitude of the epithelial cell-like elasticity of their microenvironment. Such E-cadherin adhesions were of two types: linear shaped adhesions and irregularly shaped adhesions. We found that linear adhesions were dependent on formin-dependent linear actin bundles and irregular adhesions were dependent on high local actin density. Thus, we found that actin is a crucial determinant of how E-cadherin adhesions are organized in response to cell-like soft microenvironments. All these findings have important implications for tissue development (morphogenesis), dysregulation (such as during cancer progression) as well as tissue engineering

Scalable user data management in multi-tenant cloud environments

The rise of cloud computing and its elastic, on-demand resource provisioning introduces the need for a flexible and scalable multi-tenant architecture. In a multi-tenant application every tenant (client) makes use of shared application instances, but each tenant typically has its own user data. The shared application instance behaves like a private instance by guaranteeing both data separation and performance separation for every tenant. As the number of tenants increases, the amount of data grows. A scalable solution for the storage is needed, allowing tenant data to be divided over multiple database instances, but taking into account performance isolation and custom data assurance policies. In this paper we introduce an abstraction layer for achieving high scalability for the storage of tenant data. This layer uses data allocation algorithms to determine an acceptable allocation of tenant data to different databases. We describe a mathematical model for the allocation of tenant data which can be optimized using existing linear programming techniques, and introduce the BDAA-n and FDAA, two algorithms that will find an optimal allocation of data by iterating over the possible permutations. The proposed solutions are evaluated based on their flexibility, complexity and efficiency. The flexibility of the BDAA and FDAA makes them easy to customize and extend to fit most scenarios, but the algorithms will achieve best results for tenants with a limited number of subtenants. Linear programming is an alternative for tenants with a higher number of subtenants, but the customizability of the algorithm for specific use cases is limited due to the need for linear functions

Elastic circuits

Elasticity in circuits and systems provides tolerance to variations in computation and communication delays. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of elastic circuits for those designers who are mainly familiar with synchronous design. Elasticity can be implemented both synchronously and asynchronously, although it was traditionally more often associated with asynchronous circuits. This paper shows that synchronous and asynchronous elastic circuits can be designed, analyzed, and optimized using similar techniques. Thus, choices between synchronous and asynchronous implementations are localized and deferred until late in the design process.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version