Supercritical sage extracts as anti-inflammatory food ingredients

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Industrial Crops and Products. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Industrial Crops and Products, [54, (2014)] DOI: 10.1016/j.indcrop.2014.01.021The anti-inflammatory capacity of supercritical CO2extracts (S1 and S2) obtained from sage (Salvia offi-cinalis) was evaluated using THP-1 human macrophages activated with human ox-LDL, a specific in vitromodel to determine the anti-inflammatory effect of the extracts in an atherosclerotic environment. Theexpression of pro-inflammatory cytokines, with an important role in the atherogenic process, such asTNF- , IL-1 and IL-6, in presence of different extracts concentrations was evaluated. Results showedthat 30 g/mL of both supercritical extracts (S1 and S2) markedly suppressed the ox-LDL induced pro-duction of TNF- , IL-1 and IL-6, as well as their mRNA expression. Data showed that S1 presented ahigher anti-inflammatory activity than S2.A characterization by GC–MS of sage extracts identified 16 compounds, mainly camphor, borneol and1,8-cineole. These three compounds represented a 62.4% of S1 and a 48.1% of S2. Camphor, borneol and1,8-cineole presented an important anti-inflammatory activity in the proposed model, with a decreasein the release and gene expression of TNF- , IL-1 and IL-6 and an increase in IL-10 expression. Theseresults explained the higher activity found in S1.This study suggested that supercritical sage extracts could be used as food ingredients in the develop-ment of anti-inflammatory/anti-atherogenic products.Financial support from Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CICYT) (Project: IPT-300000-2010-034, Ingredientes Saludables Mediterráneos Innovadores (INNSAMED) And Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (ALIBIRD, project S-505/AGR-0153). E.A. thanks Spanish Ministry of Education for a FPU grant

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data