The anti-biofilm activity of essential oils against Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella Enteritidis

[SPA] La presencia de biofilms es habitual en la industria alimentaria. Los biofilms pueden presentarse en todo tipo de superficies de las plantas de procesado de alimentos, desde plásticos, vidrio, metal o madera, hasta los propios alimentos. La fijación de las bacterias a los alimentos o a las superficies conduce a serios problemas higiénicos y pérdidas económicas debidas a la alteración de alimentos. Además, los biofilms persisten en las superficies en contacto con los alimentos. Por estas razones, se considera que la presencia de biofilms en los sistemas alimentarios constituye un riesgo grave para la salud pública. El uso de productos químicos no está recomendado ya que las bacterias pueden desarrollar resistencia a los mismos, que puede llevar a un aumento significativo del número de cepas microbianas con resistencia adquirida. Así pues, resulta conveniente investigar el uso de productos naturales(aceites esenciales), conocidos por su actividad antimicrobiana, para el control de los biofilms causados por microorganismos patógenos. [ENG] The presence of biofilms is common in food industry. Biofilms can exist on all types of surfaces in food plants ranging from plastic, glass, metal, wood, to food products. The attachment of the bacteria to the food product or the product contact surfaces leads to serious hygienic problems and economic losses due to food spoilage. In addition to that, biofilms persist on food contact surfaces. For these reasons, it is considered that the presence of biofilms in the food systems is a serious public health risk. Chemical products are not recommended because the bacteria can acquire resistance, which lead to a significant increase in the number of microbial strains becoming resistant. Therefore, it is important to investigate the use of natural products (essential oils), known for their antimicrobial activity, in order to control biofilm development by foodborne pathogens.This research will be financially supported, initially, by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through project AGL2013-48993-C2-1-R

Applications of microsatellite markers for the characterization of olive genetic resources of tunisia

Among the countries of the Mediterranean Basin, Tunisia is located at the crossroad for the immigration of several civilizations over the last two millennia, becoming a strategic place for gene flow, and a secondary center of diversity for olive species. Olive is one of the principal crop species in Tunisia and now it strongly characterizes the rural landscape of the country. In recent years, collecting missions on farm and in situ were carried out by various institutes, with special emphasis given to ex situ collections serving as a reference for the identification of olive germplasm. Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) represent the easiest and cheapest markers for olive genetic fingerprinting and have been the tool of choice for studying the genetic diversity of this crop in Tunisia, to resolve cases of homonymy and synonymy among the commercialized varieties, to identify rare cultivars, to improve knowledge about the genetic variability of this crop, to identify a hot spot of olive biodiversity in the Tunisian oasis of Degache, and to enrich the national reference collection of olive varieties. The present review describes the state of the art of the genetic characterization of the Tunisian olive germplasm and illustrate the progress obtained through the SSR markers, in individuating interesting genotypes that could be used for facing incoming problems determined by climate changes

A novel approach of mining write-prints for authorship attribution in e-mail forensics

There is an alarming increase in the number of cyber-crime incidents through anonymous e-mails. The problem of email authorship attribution is to identify the most plausible author of an anonymous e-mail from a group of potential suspects. Most previous contributions employed a traditional classification approach, such as decision tree and Support Vector Machine (SVM), to identify the author and studied the effects of different writing style features on the classification accuracy. However, little attention has been given on ensuring the quality of the evidence. In this paper, we introduce an innovative data mining method to capture the writeprint of every suspect and model it as combinations of features that occurred frequently in the suspect’s emails. This notion is called frequent pattern, which has proven to be effective in many data mining applications, but it is the first time to be applied to the problem of authorship attribution. Unlike the traditional approach, the extracted write-print by our method is unique among the suspects and, therefore, provides convincing and credible evidence for presenting it in a court of law. Experiments on real-life e-mails suggest that the proposed method can effectively identify the author and the results are supported by a strong evidence

Surdité professionnelle dans une industrie automobile de la région du centre Tunisien reconnaissance et indemnisation

Objectif : La surdité professionnelle pose encore des problèmes de reconnaissance et d’indemnisation en Tunisie. L’objectif de notre étude est d’analyser les conditions de reconnaissance et d’indemnisation de la surdité professionnelle auprès des travailleurs d’une industrie automobile.Matériel et méthodes : Nous avons mené une étude descriptive rétrospective qui a porté sur les salariés de la Société Tunisienne d’Industrie Automobile (STIA) victimes de surdité professionnelle reconnue par la Commission Médicale du centre sur une période de cinq ans (2003 à 2007).Résultats : Un total de 81 dossiers de surdité professionnelle reconnue a été colligé durant la période d’étude. Notre population était constituée par une main d’oeuvre masculine qualifiée (50,6%) et non qualifiée (38,3%) ayant une ancienneté moyenne dans le poste bruyant de 28,7 ± 6,8 ans. Le niveau moyen d’exposition professionnelle au bruit était de 90,7 ± 3,9dB(A). Il était plus élevé dans les ateliers de presse [92,4dB(A)], de tôlerie [91,6 dB(A)] et de peinture [90 dB(A)]. La perte auditive moyenne (PAM) sur la meilleure oreille était de 65,7 ± 17,4dB. Les potentiels évoqués auditifs ont été pratiqués chez 66 patients (81,5%) et ont confirmé le diagnostic de surdité de perception dans 64 cas et d’une surdité mixte dans les 2 autres cas. L’audiométrie tonale avec prothèse auditive a été pratiquée dans 71,6% des cas et a relevé une amélioration estimée nette chez 81% des patients. Le taux moyen de l’incapacitépermanente partielle était de 21,5 ± 6,8% avec des extrêmes allant de 8 et 51%. La majorité des salariés (92,6%) avaient un taux d’IPP entre 15 et 35%. La PAM > 60 dB a été statistiquement corrélée avec la catégorie professionnelle (p=0,017) et l’ancienneté au travail (p=0,039).Conclusion : La réparation de la surdité professionnelle présente encore des limites et des imperfections liées aux critères de reconnaissances qui doivent être révisées.Mots-clés : Surdité professionnelle, Bruit, Industrie automobile, Réparation

Recovery, assessment, and molecular characterization of minor olive genotypes in Tunisia

Olive is one of the oldest cultivated species in the Mediterranean Basin, including Tunisia, where it has a wide diversity, with more than 200 cultivars, of both wild and feral forms. Many minor cultivars are still present in marginal areas of Tunisia, where they are maintained by farmers in small local groves, but they are poorly characterized and evaluated. In order to recover this neglected germplasm, surveys were conducted in different areas, and 31 genotypes were collected, molecularly characterized with 12 nuclear microsatellite (simple sequence repeat (SSR)) markers, and compared with 26 reference cultivars present in the Tunisian National Olive collection. The analysis revealed an overall high genetic diversity of this olive’s germplasm, but also discovered the presence of synonymies and homonymies among the commercialized varieties. The structure analysis showed the presence of different gene pools in the analyzed germplasm. In particular, the marginal germplasm from Ras Jbal and Azmour is characterized by gene pools not present in commercial (Nurseries) varieties, pointing out the very narrow genetic base of the commercialized olive material in Tunisia, and the need to broaden it to avoid the risk of genetic erosion of this species in this country

The role of alveolar type II cells in swine leptospirosis

Abstract: This study aimed to investigate a possible relationship between alveolar type II cells and the inflammatory response to infection with Leptospira spp., and thus comprise a further element that can be involved in the pathogenesis of lung injury in naturally infected pigs. The study group consisted of 73 adult pigs that were extensively reared and slaughtered in Teresina, Piauí state, and Timon, Maranhão state, Brazil. The diagnosis of leptospirosis was made using the microscopic agglutination test (MAT) aided by immunohistochemistry and polymerase chain reaction. The MAT registered the occurrence of anti-Leptospira antibodies in 10.96% (8/73) of the pigs. Immunohistochemistry allowed for the visualization of the Leptospira spp. antigen in the lungs of 87.67% (64/73) of the pigs. There was hyperplasia of bronchus-associated lymphoid tissue and circulatory changes, such as congestion of alveolar septa, parenchymal hemorrhage and edema within the alveoli. Lung inflammation was more intense (p = 0.0312) in infected animals, which also showed increased thickening of the alveolar septa (p = 0.0006). Evaluation of alveolar type II (ATII) cells using an anti-TTF-1 (Thyroid Transcription Factor-1) antibody showed that there were more immunostained cells in the non-infected pigs (53.8%) than in the infected animals (46.2%) and that there was an inverse correlation between TTF-1 positive cells and the inflammatory infiltrate. There was no amplification of Leptospira DNA in the lung samples, but leptospiral DNA amplification was observed in the kidneys. The results of this study showed that a relationship exists between a decrease in alveolar type II cells and a leptospire infection. Thus, this work points to the importance of studying the ATII cells as a potential marker of the level of lung innate immune response during leptospirosis in pigs

Body appreciation around the world: Measurement invariance of the Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age.

The Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) is a widely used measure of a core facet of the positive body image construct. However, extant research concerning measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across a large number of nations remains limited. Here, we utilised the Body Image in Nature (BINS) dataset - with data collected between 2020 and 2022 - to assess measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis indicated that full scalar invariance was upheld across all nations, languages, gender identities, and age groups, suggesting that the unidimensional BAS-2 model has widespread applicability. There were large differences across nations and languages in latent body appreciation, while differences across gender identities and age groups were negligible-to-small. Additionally, greater body appreciation was significantly associated with higher life satisfaction, being single (versus being married or in a committed relationship), and greater rurality (versus urbanicity). Across a subset of nations where nation-level data were available, greater body appreciation was also significantly associated with greater cultural distance from the United States and greater relative income inequality. These findings suggest that the BAS-2 likely captures a near-universal conceptualisation of the body appreciation construct, which should facilitate further cross-cultural research. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Body appreciation around the world: Measurement invariance of the Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age

Abstract The Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) is a widely used measure of a core facet of the positive body image construct. However, extant research concerning measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across a large number of nations remains limited. Here, we utilised the Body Image in Nature (BINS) dataset – with data collected between 2020 and 2022 – to assess measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis indicated that full scalar invariance was upheld across all nations, languages, gender identities, and age groups, suggesting that the unidimensional BAS-2 model has widespread applicability. There were large differences across nations and languages in latent body appreciation, while differences across gender identities and age groups were negligible-to-small. Additionally, greater body appreciation was significantly associated with higher life satisfaction, being single (versus being married or in a committed relationship), and greater rurality (versus urbanicity). Across a subset of nations where nation-level data were available, greater body appreciation was also significantly associated with greater cultural distance from the United States and greater relative income inequality. These findings suggest that the BAS-2 likely captures a near-universal conceptualisation of the body appreciation construct, which should facilitate further cross-cultural research

Body appreciation around the world: Measurement invariance of the Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age

The Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) is a widely used measure of a core facet of the positive body image construct. However, extant research concerning measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across a large number of nations remains limited. Here, we utilised the Body Image in Nature (BINS) dataset - with data collected between 2020 and 2022 - to assess measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis indicated that full scalar invariance was upheld across all nations, languages, gender identities, and age groups, suggesting that the unidimensional BAS-2 model has widespread applicability. There were large differences across nations and languages in latent body appreciation, while differences across gender identities and age groups were negligible-to-small. Additionally, greater body appreciation was significantly associated with higher life satisfaction, being single (versus being married or in a committed relationship), and greater rurality (versus urbanicity). Across a subset of nations where nation-level data were available, greater body appreciation was also significantly associated with greater cultural distance from the United States and greater relative income inequality. These findings suggest that the BAS-2 likely captures a near-universal conceptualisation of the body appreciation construct, which should facilitate further cross-cultural research

Exposure and connectedness to natural environments: An examination of the measurement invariance of the Nature Exposure Scale (NES) and Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups

Detachment from nature is contributing to the environmental crisis and reversing this trend requires detailed monitoring and targeted interventions to reconnect people to nature. Most tools measuring nature exposure and attachment were developed in high-income countries and little is known about their robustness across national and linguistic groups. Therefore, we used data from the Body Image in Nature Survey to assess measurement invariance of the Nature Exposure Scale (NES) and the Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups (N = 56,968). While multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) of the NES supported full scalar invariance across gender identities and age groups, only partial scalar invariance was supported across national and linguistic groups. MG-CFA of the CNS also supported full scalar invariance across gender identities and age groups, but only partial scalar invariance of a 7-item version of the CNS across national and linguistic groups. Nation-level associations between NES and CNS scores were negligible, likely reflecting a lack of conceptual clarity over what the NES is measuring. Individual-level associations between both measures and sociodemographic variables were weak. Findings suggest that the CNS-7 may be a useful tool to measure nature connectedness globally, but measures other than the NES may be needed to capture nature exposure cross-culturally