Production of high added value products from eggshells

There are an increasing number of food companies addressing sustainable-manufacturing practices as part of social responsibility reporting. The egg processing industry produces several tons of eggshell residues which are a major environmental problem and represent a significant cost for these industries (ca. 0.6 % of sales). The main goal of this work is to produce high added value products, namely collagen and bioactive peptides, using the remnant of collagen extraction from the eggshell membrane. The target market of the products obtained is the biomedical, pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food industry. The separation of the shell and the membrane was optimized and a chemical-physical process was performed having a yield of 9 % (w membrane/w shell). Times and yields for different separation methods were calculated and the economic viability of the process was studied. In order to optimize collagen extraction from the eggshell membranes several variables were studied (e.g. temperature, enzyme concentration and time). The collagen obtained was separated using saline precipitation steps and different collagen types were identified. The collagen types were visualized using SDS-electrophoresis and total quantification of collagen was made by hydroxyproline method. Moreover, the residue after collagen extraction was further digested with different enzymes, namely pancreatin, tripsin and lysin and the peptides profile was determined by HPLC-UV method. The results showed promising strategies for using this technology at industrial scale as an economic viable technology for producing high added value products from eggshells membranes. This technology will equally contribute to reducing the environmental problem associated with these residues

Olive Oil Screening

On the one hand, the olive oils’ quality is fixed by the region in which it is produced, the olive variety, the year of production, the degree of maturation, the extraction and the preservation processes, i.e., the olive oils` quality is assessed by two types of analyzes, the organoleptic and the biochemical ones. On the other hand, there are no studies linking analytical parameters to sensory data due to the nonlinearity that exists between these two types of variables. The present study aims to provide an answer to these problems by modeling the causal processes used at different types of olive and olive oil production. To this end, we called at an Artificial Neural Network approach to problem solving once it provides a way to handle the various stages of ripeness of the olives and olive oil production, by allowing one to deal with incomplete, unknown or even self-contradictory information or knowledge

Dielectric spectroscopy monitoring of a bioreactor process for hiPSC expansion and differentiation

Bioprocessing strategies using 3D cell culturing approaches, such as cell aggregates, are promising solutions to achieve efficient and scalable bioprocesses for stem cell expansion and differentiation. However, tracking viable and total cell numbers in such culture systems is not straightforward. It requires cell detachment, disaggregation or disruption, which results in measurements that are laborious, biased and with high variability. In this work, we used a commercially available capacitance probe to explore the applicability of dielectric spectroscopy for in situ monitoring of a multistep process for expansion and differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) cultivated as cell aggregates. After 5 days of cell expansion in a bioreactor, the hepatic differentiation step was integrated by addition of different levels of specific soluble factors at various stages of the process to promote growth and generate populations successively enriched for definitive endoderm, hepatoblasts, hepatocyte progenitors and mature hepatocytes. While this differentiation procedure has been previously validated for monolayer cultures, this was the first time it was carried out in a stirred tank bioreactor operated in perfusion mode. Phenotype analysis confirmed a marked increase in key hepatic differentiation markers culminating at day 21 of differentiation. Our data shows a good correlation between total volume of the cell aggregates and permittivity measured by the probe (R2 = 0.84). However, there was a delay between changes in cell concentration and the permittivity signal. This suggests that cell expansion requires a few days to result in increased volume of the cell aggregates and that each aggregate behaves as one overall inducible dipole. The β-dispersion curve shape also appears to change over culture time and could eventually be used as an indicator for differentiation progression. Dielectric spectroscopy has been used successfully to monitor viable cell concentration in different single-cell suspension cultures, but there are few published applications to 3D cultures. Our results demonstrate the potential of dielectric spectroscopy to monitor complex bioprocesses for human stem cell aggregates in stirred cultures. Acknowledgements: Funding provided by ERA-NET/E-Rare3 programme through research project ERAdicatPH (E-Rare3/0002/2015). The authors acknowledge Dr Juan Rodriguez-Madoz (University of Navarra, Spain) and Dr Anders Aspegren (Takara Bio Europe – Cellartis AB, Sweden) for helpful discussions on hepatic differentiation of hiPSC.

Raça Puro-Sangue Lusitano – Caracterização Genética por Análise Demográfica 2020

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CNV Characterization, Inheritance and Phenotypic Correlations in Families With Autism

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have a strong genetic component, with an estimated heritability of over 90%1. Recent studies carried out by the Autism Genome Project (AGP) consortium suggest that rare Copy Number Variants (CNVs), characterized by submicroscopic chromosomal deletions and duplications, are more frequent in ASD compared to controls, and may play an important role in susceptibility to this disorder2. However, to adequately assess pathogenicity, a detailed characterization of patients CNVs and phenotype is required. The goal of this study was to establish the clinical and etiological relevance for ASD of potentially pathogenic CNVs identified in a Portuguese population sample by whole genome CNV analysis, through the detailed characterization of CNVs and correlation with clinical phenotypes. Analysis of the AGP genome-wide CNV results using 1M SNP microarray2 identified a total of 14218 CNVs in 342 Portuguese probands. We selected 291 CNVs, present in 191 individuals (19 females and 172 males), using the following criteria: 1) CNVs that contained implicated/candidate genes for ASD; 2) CNVs in genomic regions known to be implicated/candidate for ASD; 3) CNVs in regions associated with syndromes with ASD symptoms; and 4) high confidence CNVs that did not overlap more than 20% with controls in available databases. We explored recurrence rates, genic content, regulatory elements, inheritance patterns and phenotypic correlations.This work was supported by the fellowships SFRH/BPD/74739/2010 to ICC, SFRH/BPD/64281/2009 to CC and SFRH/BD/79081/2011 to BO from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal)

Raça suína Malhado de Alcobaça: caracterização genética por análise demográfica - 2022

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Raça Puro-Sangue Lusitano: caracterização genética por análise demográfica - 2022

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Relevance of Common and Rare CNVs for Autism Etiology

Recent reports by the Autism Genome Project (AGP) consortium and other groups show that Copy Number Variants (CNVs), while individually rare, collectively may explain a large fraction of the etiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The goal of this study was to establish the clinical and etiological relevance for ASD of potentially pathogenic CNVs identified in a Portuguese population sample by whole genome CNV analysis, through the detailed characterization of CNVs and correlation with clinical phenotypes. Analysis of the Autism Genome Project genome-wide CNV results using 1M SNP microarray1 identified a total of 14218 CNVs in 342 Portuguese probands. We selected 292 CNVs, present in 191 individuals (19 females and 172 males), using the following criteria: 1) CNVs that contained implicated/candidate genes for ASD; 2) CNVs in genomic regions known to be implicated/candidate for ASD; 3) CNVs containing genes associated with syndromes with ASD symptoms; and 4) high confidence CNVs that did not overlap more than 20% with controls in available databases. We explored recurrence rates, genic content, regulatory elements, inheritance patterns and clinical correlationsThis work was supported by the fellowships SFRH/BPD/74739/2010 to ICC, SFRH/BPD/64281/2009 to CC and SFRH/BD/79081/2011 to BO from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT; Portugal)

Phenotypic categorization of putative pathogenic CNVs in a population of Autism Spectrum Disorder patients

All individuals in this study signed an informed consent.This work was supported by the fellowships SFRH/BPD/74739/2010 to ICC, SFRH/BPD/64281/2009 to CC and SFRH/BD/79081/2011 to BO from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal)