Cross-tolerance to abiotic stresses in halophytes: Application for phytoremediation of organic pollutants

International audienceHalopytes are plants able to tolerate high salt concentrations but no clear definition was retained for them. In literature, there are more studies that showed salt-enhanced tolerance to other abiotic stresses compared to investigations that found enhanced salt tolerance by other abiotic stresses in halophytes. The phenomenon by which a plant resistance to a stress induces resistance to another is referred to as cross-tolerance. In this work, we reviewed cross-tolerance in halophytes at the physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels. A special attention was accorded to the cross-tolerance between salinity and organic pollutants that could allow halophytes a higher potential of xenobiotic phytoremediation in comparison with glycophytes

Test Case Generation of Actor Systems

Testing is a vital part of the software development process. It is even more so in the context of concurrent languages, since due to undesired task interleavings and to unexpected behaviours of the underlying task scheduler, errors can go easily undetected. Test case generation (TCG) is the process of automatically generating test inputs for interesting coverage criteria, which are then applied to the system under test. This paper presents a TCG framework for actor systems, which consists of three main elements, which are the original contributions of this work: (1) a symbolic execution calculus, which allows symbolically executing the program (i.e., executing the program for unknown input data), (2) improved techniques to avoid performing redundant computations during symbolic execution, (3) new termination and coverage criteria, which ensure the termination of symbolic execution and guarantee that the test cases provide the desired degree of code coverage. Finally, our framework has been implemented and evaluated within the aPET system

Phenolic metabolites as compliance biomarker for polyphenol intake in a randomized controlled human intervention

Clinical trials are needed to confirm the association between polyphenol consumption and lower incidence of chronic diseases observed in epidemiological studies. However, a reliable evaluation of polyphenol intake is complicated. An 8-week randomized controlled trial (78 subjects) was performed using two isoenergetic diets differing only for polyphenol contents. Then, urinary phenolic metabolite profiles were analysed using gas-chromatography with mass detection. Phenolic metabolites detected in 24-h-urine were hydroxylated phenolic acids with C1-C3 side chain in the group consuming polyphenol-rich diet. The intake of polyphenol-rich foods increases the excretion of phenolic metabolites in urine providing a profile, which may serve as compliance biomarker of polyphenol-rich diet. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Enzyme-Assisted Extraction of Bioactive Compounds from Raspberry (Rubus idaeus L.) Pomace

Industrial processing of raspberries into juice and jam results in the production of with high content of lipophilic and hydrophilic phytochemicals. Usually considered as waste, raspberry pomace is occasionally cold-pressed to recover specialty oil. However, the resulting pomace press-cake (PPC) still contains 30% to 35% of lipophilic compounds, such as essential fatty acids, tocols, phytosterols, and ellagitannins initially present in pomace. In a perspective of sustainable development, we investigate an eco-friendly process using an aqueous enzyme-assisted extraction (AEAE) to simultaneously and effectively recover lipophilic compounds and polyphenols from the PPC. The performance of different combinations of carbohydrases and proteases was compared. After selecting the best enzymatic system, a definitive screening design involving six factors was then implemented to optimize the process. Under optimized conditions, 1.2 units of thermostable alkaline protease/100 g PPC, pH 9, 60 degrees C, and 2 hr hydrolysis, more than 38% of total PPC lipophilic content were recovered in the aqueous medium. The recovery of polyphenols and antioxidant activity was, respectively, 48% and 25% higher than obtained by extraction with methanol/acetone/water mixture. Such an AEAE extract might prove useful in food and nutraceutical applications. Practical Application Raspberry pomace, a food industrial by-product, is often considered as waste. However, it is a rich source of phytochemicals, such as tocols, polyphenols, and polyunsaturated fatty acids. To overcome the drawbacks of organic solvent use, an enzyme-assisted extraction process was developed as an eco-friendly alternative to recover these bioactive compounds. Definitive screening design experimental design was used to enhance polyphenols and lipophilics extraction yields while reducing process costs. This extract is an oil-in-water emulsion, with high content in antioxidant phytochemicals, which might have potential for use in nutraceutical applications. Therefore, this green process developed for the valorization of raspberry pomace is considered as a perspective of sustainable development

Sigorta şirketlerinin finansal yeterliliğinin tespitinde sermayenin belirlenmesi ve dağıtımına ilişkin bir uygulama

ÖZETSigorta şirketlerinin finansal yeterliliklerinin tespiti için gerek akademisyenler gerekse düzenleme otoriteleri ve derecelendirme şirketleri çeşitli çözümler geliştirmişlerdir. Solvency II ile bu çabalar uluslar arası bir platforma taşınmış, standart ve içsel modeller tartışmaya açılmıştır. Bu çalışmada, sigorta şirketlerinin sermaye gereksinimi ile riskin fiyatlandırılması, iflas riskleri ve değer maksimizasyonu arasındaki ilişkiden hareketle sigorta risklerine uygun yetkin bir risk ölçümünün ne olacağı ve risklerin nasıl sayısallaştırılabileceği araştırılmaktadır. Basel II çerçevesinde bankaların sermaye yeterliliklerinde standart ve içsel modellerin nasıl olması gerektiği konusunda sigorta şirketlerine göre çok yol katedilmiş olması, sigorta şirketlerinin finansal yeterliliklerinin tespitinde yol gösterici olmuştur. Çalışmanın amacı, Türk sigorta sektöründe birleşme ve devralmalar neticesinde önceki döneme göre nispeten oturmuş yapısında finansal yeterliliğini ve devraldığı riskleri değerlendirerek, sermaye dağıtımı modeli ile Solvency II düzenlemelerinin ışığında yeni bir yaklaşım getirmektir.Temel prensip, fazla sermaye tutmak maliyetleri arttırır, çok düşük sermaye tutmak da, poliçe sahiplerinin sigorta taleplerini azaltır. Matematiksel olarak istenen sermaye, rassal kaybı gerçek bir sayıya çeviren bir fonksiyondur. Aktüeryal olarak, risk ölçümünü rassal kayıptan gerçek değere bir geçiş olarak düşünebiliriz. En çok kullanılan temel risk ölçümü, standard sapmadır. Ancak, sigorta riskleri konkav dağılımlara ve lineer olmayan kuyruk korelasyonlarına sahiptir. Bu nedenle standart sapma ve volatilenin ötesinde ölçümlere ihtiyaç vardır. Bu anlamda, basitliği, tutarlılığı ve literatürdeki popularitesi ve kurumsal bir bilgisayar programı gerektirmemesi nedeniyle çalışmada kuyruk RMD si ölçümü seçilmiştir. Öte yandan riskler arasındaki bağlılık çeşitliliğin faydasını azaltır. Bağlılığı lineer korelasyon ile modelleyebiliriz. Önerdiğimiz modelde, sermaye dağıtımı finansal varlık fiyatlandırma modeline benzer bir yaklaşım sergilenmiştir. ABSTRACTAcademicians, regulatory authorities and rating agencies have been worked on finding an appropriate answer for how much capital is adequate for an insurance company. Solvency II raised this effort into a global platform, standard and internal models are getting to be discussed . Taking into consideration the relationship between the capital needs of insurance companies, the pricing of risk and value maximization, this thesis aims to assess the suitable risk measures and how to quantify them.Basel II is also leading for defining solvency requirements in insurance sector since these models are already set in the banking area. The aim of my thesis is to evaluate the solvency and the risks taken in the insurance sector just after the end of mergers and acquisitions, and to create a new approach within the light of Solvency II regulations with the capital allocation model. The main principle is that setting aside too much capital increases the cost of insurance. But at the same time, reserving inadequate capital also causes less insurance demand of policy holders. Actuarially speaking, risk measure is to transfer random loss to a real number. Common risk measures are standard deviation. But insurance risks are concave and have a non-linear distribution. So there is a need for a measure beyond these. Because of simplicity, coherence, popularity, there is no need for a branded software, tail VaR are chosen. The dependence can be modelled with linear correlation. In my proposed model, capital allocation is very similar to CAPM

Direct mass spectrometry approaches to characterize polyphenol composition of complex samples

cited By 39International audienceLower molecular weight polyphenols including proanthocyanidin oligomers can be analyzed after HPLC separation on either reversed-phase or normal phase columns. However, these techniques are time consuming and can have poor resolution as polymer chain length and structural diversity increase. The detection of higher molecular weight compounds, as well as the determination of molecular weight distributions, remain major challenges in polyphenol analysis. Approaches based on direct mass spectrometry (MS) analysis that are proposed to help overcome these problems are reviewed. Thus, direct flow injection electrospray ionization mass spectrometry analysis can be used to establish polyphenol fingerprints of complex extracts such as in wine. This technique enabled discrimination of samples on the basis of their phenolic (i.e. anthocyanin, phenolic acid and flavan-3-ol) compositions, but larger oligomers and polymers were poorly detectable. Detection of higher molecular weight proanthocyanidins was also restricted with matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) MS, suggesting that they are difficult to desorb as gas-phase ions. The mass distribution of polymeric fractions could, however, be determined by analyzing the mass distributions of bovine serum albumin/proanthocyanidin complexes using MALDI-TOF-MS. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Rosé Wines: impact of storage conditions in tank on the polyphenol composition and color

Rosé Wines: impact of storage conditions in tank on the polyphenol composition and color. Congrès d'Oenologi

Test Case Generation by Symbolic Execution: Basic Concepts, a CLP-based Instance, and Actor-based Concurrency

The focus of this tutorial is white-box test case generation (TCG) based on symbolic execution. Symbolic execution consists in executing a program with the contents of its input arguments being symbolic variables rather than concrete values. A symbolic execution tree characterizes the set of execution paths explored during the symbolic execution of a program. Test cases can be then obtained from the successful branches of the tree. The tutorial is split into three parts: (1) The first part overviews the basic techniques used in TCG to ensure termination, handling heap-manipulating programs, achieving compositionality in the process and guiding TCG towards interesting test cases. (2) In the second part, we focus on a particular implementation of the TCG framework in constraint logic programming (CLP). In essense, the imperative object-oriented program under test is automatically transformed into an equivalent executable CLP-translated program. The main advantage of CLP-based TCG is that the standard mechanism of CLP performs symbolic execution for free. The PET system is an open-source software that implements this approach. (3) Finally, in the last part, we study the extension of TCG to actor-based concurrent programs