Investigating postharvest chilling injury in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) fruit using magnetic resonance imaging and 5-azacytidine, a hypomethylation agent

Tomato, like most species from tropical and subtropical regions, exhibits postharvest chilling injury (PCI) when stored at low temperatures. Because of its economic importance and the functional genomics tools available, we used tomato to investigate aspects of fruit PCI development. We asked two questions: First, are there spatial-temporal differences in the development of PCI that can be detected by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)? Here, the aim was to use a non-invasive method to study PCI progression in vivo. At mature green and breaker, the pericarp, locular tissue and columella produced distinct D-values while in contrast, there was no such differentiation in riper fruit. Although the pericarp is where most PCI symptoms are visible, this tissue showed less dynamism upon cold exposure, compared to the inner tissues as detected by MRI. This suggests the occurrence of distinct, independently modulated mechanisms contributing to the development of PCI-symptomatology. Collectively our data showed that the MRI could detect fruit ripening, its attenuation by cold, and fruit tissue-specific responses to chilling stress. The second question we asked was if epigenetic modification of the tomato genome or transcriptome influences PCI response. We examined PCI severity in fruit injected with a demethylating agent, 5- azacytidine (AZA). Two tomato genotypes exposed to varying severities of cold-stress were studied. Results suggested that AZA was able to moderate PCI in 'Micro-Tom' after 3 weeks at 2.5°C, while different patterns were observed in 'Sun Cherry' across various cold treatments. The effects of AZA on PCI were complex, multilayered and highly context-dependent

Salmonella Contamination of Swine Carcasses and Pork Products

This paper includes results from two separate studies: one surveyed the level of contamination at four points during the slaughter and processing of chilled pork; the second study surveyed ground pork from 17 companies representing five different segments of ground pork distribution. Regarding the carcass study, the highest percentage of Salmonella spp. isolated from the different sampling sites by a swab method, for both pork loin and ham surfaces, was 4.4% after the singeing step of the slaughter process. Overall, 1.7% of all pork samples showing positive isolations for Salmonella spp., however, there were no Salmonella spp. found in one of the three plants surveyed. Salmonella were isolated primarily from pork before fabrication and refrigerated storage. A continous reduction in the numbers of Salmonella spp. isolates was detected from the point of singeing to the point of fabrication. No Salmonella spp. were isolated from vacuumpackaged pork stored for 36 days at 2EC. The purpose of the ground pork project was to survey current sources of ground pork, and to determine the effects of different handling methods and raw material sources on the microbial quality of ground pork. There were no significant differences in the microbial counts, or prevalence of selected organisms, between the different types of companies from which the ground pork was obtained. Estimated variance among locations, samples and sample duplicates show that additional ground pork samples are needed to strengthen the results of this study

Feature extraction based on bio-inspired model for robust emotion recognition

Emotional state identification is an important issue to achieve more natural speech interactive systems. Ideally, these systems should also be able to work in real environments in which generally exist some kind of noise. Several bio-inspired representations have been applied to artificial systems for speech processing under noise conditions. In this work, an auditory signal representation is used to obtain a novel bio-inspired set of features for emotional speech signals. These characteristics, together with other spectral and prosodic features, are used for emotion recognition under noise conditions. Neural models were trained as classifiers and results were compared to the well-known mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. Results show that using the proposed representations, it is possible to significantly improve the robustness of an emotion recognition system. The results were also validated in a speaker independent scheme and with two emotional speech corpora.Fil: Albornoz, Enrique Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Milone, Diego Humberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Rufiner, Hugo Leonardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentin

Estado trófico y monitoreo de variables limnológicas en un lago artificial (Lago del Fuerte, Tandil, prov. de Buenos Aires)

“Del Fuerte” Lake (about 20 acres). It is used for recreation and tourism. During the researches which have been made since1995 to 2005, it was determined that the lake is eutrophicated. The aim of this study is to update the levels of trophic state of the lake and explore the relationship between chlorophyll-a concentration and secchi disk depth. The method of Trophic State Index of Carlson and the OCDE index was applied, and the data was collected in two sampling zones every 15 days. The result of this study was the collection of 22 samples from October 2007 until today. Comparing the sampling zones, they proved not significant differences of (p>0.05). With respect to larger chlorophyll values (13 μg/l), the secchi disk depth changes temporarily, with very small effect on secchi disk depth (0.08 m); showing nonchlorophyll light absorption. Comparing summer and winter, they proved not significant differences of (p>0.05), except temperature (p<0.05). The condition of the lake is confirmed as Eutrophic, according to the TSI index, (TSI=78 of secchi disk depth and TSI=74 of chlorophyll-a); and Hipereutrophic according to OCDE (secchi disk depth=0.56m; chlorophyll-a=66 (μg/l).Instituto de Limnología "Raúl A. Ringuelet

Estado trófico y monitoreo de variables limnológicas en un lago artificial (Lago del Fuerte, Tandil, prov. de Buenos Aires)

“Del Fuerte” Lake (about 20 acres). It is used for recreation and tourism. During the researches which have been made since1995 to 2005, it was determined that the lake is eutrophicated. The aim of this study is to update the levels of trophic state of the lake and explore the relationship between chlorophyll-a concentration and secchi disk depth. The method of Trophic State Index of Carlson and the OCDE index was applied, and the data was collected in two sampling zones every 15 days. The result of this study was the collection of 22 samples from October 2007 until today. Comparing the sampling zones, they proved not significant differences of (p>0.05). With respect to larger chlorophyll values (13 μg/l), the secchi disk depth changes temporarily, with very small effect on secchi disk depth (0.08 m); showing nonchlorophyll light absorption. Comparing summer and winter, they proved not significant differences of (p>0.05), except temperature (p<0.05). The condition of the lake is confirmed as Eutrophic, according to the TSI index, (TSI=78 of secchi disk depth and TSI=74 of chlorophyll-a); and Hipereutrophic according to OCDE (secchi disk depth=0.56m; chlorophyll-a=66 (μg/l).Instituto de Limnología "Raúl A. Ringuelet

Beyond opinion classification: Extracting facts, opinions and experiences from health forums.

Introduction: Surveys indicate that patients, particularly those suffering from chronic conditions, strongly benefit from the information found in social networks and online forums. One challenge in accessing online health information is to differentiate between factual and more subjective information. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of exploiting lexical, syntactic, semantic, network-based and emotional properties of texts to automatically classify patient-generated contents into three types: "experiences", "facts" and "opinions", using machine learning algorithms. In this context, our goal is to develop automatic methods that will make online health information more easily accessible and useful for patients, professionals and researchers. Material and Methods: We work with a set of 3000 posts to online health forums in breast cancer, morbus crohn and different allergies. Each sentence in a post is manually labeled as "experience", "fact" or "opinion". Using this data, we train a support vector machine algorithm to perform classification. The results are evaluated in a 10-fold cross validation procedure. Results: Overall, we find that it is possible to predict the type of information contained in a forum post with a very high accuracy (over 80 percent) using simple text representations such as word embeddings and bags of words. We also analyze more complex features such as those based on the network properties, the polarity of words and the verbal tense of the sentences and show that, when combined with the previous ones, they can boost the results