Soybean processing systems

Little is known about professional soybean processing technology in Europe. This brochure describes them by referring to farms or enterprises in Germany and Austria. Through an assessment of advantages and disadvantages, the brochure provides guidance for practitioners including farmers and advisors, with relevance for conventional and organic farming

Validated UPLC-MS/MS methods to quantitate free and conjugated Alternaria toxins in commercially available tomato products and fruit and vegetable juices in Belgium

Ultraperformance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry and Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, and Safe based analytical methodologies to quantitate both free (alternariol (1), alternariol monomethyl ether (2), tenuazonic acid (3), tentoxin (4), altenuene (5), altertoxin-I (6)) and conjugated (sulfates and glucosides of 1 and 2) Alternaria toxins in fruit and vegetable juices and tomato products were developed and validated. Acceptable limits of quantitation (0.7-5.7 mu g/kg), repeatability (RSDr < 15.7%), reproducibility (RSDR < 17.9%), and apparent recovery (87.0-110.6%) were obtained for all analytes in all matrices investigated. 129 commercial foodstuffs were analyzed, and 3 was detected in 100% of tomato product samples (<LOQ to 333 mu g/kg), while 1, 2, 4, and 5 were also frequently detected (21-86%, <LOQ to 62 mu g/kg). Moreover, low levels (<LOQ to 9.9 mu g/kg) of modified Alternaria toxins (sulfates of 1 and 2) were repeatedly detected. A deterministic dietary exposure assessment revealed the possible risk for human health related to the presence of 1 and 2 in tomato based foodstuffs, whereas 3 is unlikely to be of human health concern

Challenges of Harmonizing 40 Years of AVHRR Data: The TIMELINE Experience

Earth Observation satellite data allows for the monitoring of the surface of our planet at predefined intervals covering large areas. However, there is only one medium resolution sensor family in orbit that enables an observation time span of 40 and more years at a daily repeat interval. This is the AVHRR sensor family. If we want to investigate the long-term impacts of climate change on our environment, we can only do so based on data that remains available for several decades. If we then want to investigate processes with respect to climate change, we need very high temporal resolution enabling the generation of long-term time series and the derivation of related statistical parameters such as mean, variability, anomalies, and trends. The challenges to generating a well calibrated and harmonized 40-year-long time series based on AVHRR sensor data flown on 14 different platforms are enormous. However, only extremely thorough pre-processing and harmonization ensures that trends found in the data are real trends and not sensor-related (or other) artefacts. The generation of European-wide time series as a basis for the derivation of a multitude of parameters is therefore an extremely challenging task, the details of which are presented in this paper

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Development of analytical methods for the determination of tenuazonic acid analogues in food commodities

Analogues of the Alternaria mycotoxin tenuazonic acid (TA, biosynthesized by the fungus from the amino acid isoleucine) derived from valine (ValTA), leucine (LeuTA), alanine (AlaTA) and phenylalanine (PheTA) were synthesized and characterized by mass spectrometry (MS) and (1)H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Concentrations of stock solutions were determined by quantitative (1)H NMR (qHNMR). Two analytical methods based on high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and MS detection were developed, one with derivatization with 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine (DNPH) and one without derivatization. Limits of detection (LODs) were between 1-3 mug/kg (with derivatization) and 50-80 mug/kg (without derivatization). Respective limits of quantitation (LOQs) were about three times higher. Beside TA, the analogues LeuTA (about 4{%} of TA content) and ValTA (about 10{%} of TA content) were found in highly contaminated sorghum infant cereals and sorghum grains. Other analogues were not detected. Quantification of LeuTA and ValTA was performed using [(13)C6,(15)N]-TA as internal standard and matrix matched calibration. Recovery was between 95+/-11{%} and 102+/-10{%} for both compounds. Precision (relative standard deviation of triplicate sorghum cereal analyses three times during 3 weeks) was 7{%} for TA (912+/-60 mug/kg), 17{%} for LeuTA (43+/-8 mug/kg) and 19{%} for ValTA (118+/-22 mug/kg). These results indicate that several TA-like compounds, which are not yet characterized in aspects of their toxic properties, were detected in sorghum based infant food highly contaminated with TA, already

Estimation of grassland use intensities based on high spatial resolution LAI time series

The identification and surveillance of agricultural management and the measurement of biophysical canopy parameters in grasslands is relevant for environmental protection as well as for political and economic reasons, as proper grassland management is partly subsidized. An ideal monitoring tool is remote sensing due to its area wide continuous observations. However, due to small-scaled land use patterns in many parts of central Europe, a high spatial resolution is needed. In this study, the feasibility of RapidEye data to derive leaf area index (LAI) time series and to relate them to grassland management practices is assessed. The study area is the catchment of river Ammer in southern Bavaria, where agricultural areas are mainly grasslands. While extensively managed grasslands are maintained with one to two harvests per year and no or little fertilization, intensive cultivation practices compass three to five harvests per year and turnover pasturing. Based on a RapidEye time series from 2011 with spatial resolution of 6.5 meters, LAI is derived using the inverted radiation transfer model PROSAIL. The LAI in this area ranges from 1.5 to 7.5 over the vegetation period and is estimated with an RMSE between 0.7 and 1.1. The derived LAI maps cover 85 % of the study area’s grasslands at least seven times. Using statistical metrics of the LAI time series, different grassland management types can be identified: very intensively managed meadows, intensively managed meadows, intensively managed pastures, and extensively managed meadows and moor. However, a precise identification of the mowing dates highly depends on the coincidence with satellite data acquisitions. Further analysis should focus therefor on the selection of the temporal resolution of the time series as well as on the performance of further vegetation parameters and indices compared to LAI