Production of lactic and acetic acids during fermentation of milk fortified with kiwi juice using Saccharomyces boulardii and lactobacilli

Purpose: To investigate the synergistic effect of Saccharomyces boulardii and lactobacilli on lactic and acetic acids produced during fermentation of milk fortified with kiwi juice, relative to fermentation of unfortified milk. Methods: Skimmed milk was fortified with kiwi juice (4 % v/v) and fermented for 12 h at 37 °C by a combination of S. boulardii and lactobacilli strains. Lactic and acetic acids were determined using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GS-MS). Results: The presence of kiwi juice in the milk stimulated the production of lactic (1.35 g/100g) and acetic (0.29 mg/g) by S. boulardii in the absence of lactobacilli. When S. boulardii was inoculated with Lb. casei 20975, the production of lactic acid and acetic acid increased to 2.36 g/100 g and 0.71 mg/g, respectively. Furthermore, acid production increased when Lb. plantarum RS (35-11), Lb. casei LCS, and Lb. plantarum JXJ (6 - 12) were inoculated into milk free of kiwi juice in which S. boulardii was grown. Saccharomyces boulardii resulted in marginal production of acids by Lb. fermentum F9. Conclusion: These results show that acid production is positively affected by some lactobacilli strains in the milk whether fortified with kiwi juice or free of this juice. However, fermentation of these formulations for a period longer than 6 h may result in losses in acid yield

Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) Diagnosis: Past and Present Perspectives

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a fatal X-linked disorder, characterized by progressive skeletal muscle wasting. The disease is caused by various types of mutations in the dystrophin gene (DMD). The disease occurs at a frequency of about 1 in 5000 male births, making it the most common severe neuro-muscular disease. In addition to clinical examinations of muscle strength and function, diagnosis of DMD usually involves a combination of immunological assays using muscle biopsies, typically immunohistochemistry and western blotting, and molecular techniques such as DMD gene sequencing or Multiplex Ligation Dependent Probe Amplification (MLPA) using blood samples. In fact, precise molecular diagnosis is a prerequisite for determining the appropriate personalized therapeutic approach such as exon-skipping, gene therapy or stem cell-based therapies in conjunction with gene editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas9. However, the quest for reliable biomarkers with high sensitivity and specificity for DMD from liquid biopsy is still a hotspot of research, as such non-invasive biomarker(s) would not only facilitate disease diagnosis but would also help in carrier detection, which will eventually result in better disease management. In this chapter, we will illustrate the detailed current and prospect strategies for disease

Ice cream supplemented with roasted and grilled corn powders: physical properties, rheology, antioxidant activity, color, sensory evaluation, and production cost

The present study aimed to evaluate the effects of replacing milk fat with roasted and grilled corn powders on ice cream characteristics. The results revealed that the use of roasted and grilled corn powders (2, 4, and 6%) resulted in significant changes in the physical and rheological properties of ice cream mixtures. The different levels of corn powders caused an increase in the total phenolic compounds and antioxidant activity, while a diverse manner was observed with the progress in storage period. Furthermore, the melting resistance of ice cream treatments significantly increased coinciding with the increase in roasted or grilled corn powders addition levels. In addition, roasted corn powder based-ice cream treatments recorded higher sensory evaluation scores compared to other treatments. The production cost and profit of the produced ice cream were also evaluated, and treatments supplemented with corn powders exhibited lower production cost as compared to the control sample.Universidade de Vigo / CISU

Antimicrobial susceptibility of Escherichia coli isolated from diabetic patients in Mogadishu, Somalia

BackgroundUrinary tract infections (UTIs) are a major concern for diabetic patients due to the impact of diabetes on the urinary tract and immune system. Escherichia coli is the most common pathogen causing UTIs in diabetic patients and is known for its resistance. This study aimed to assess the antimicrobial susceptibility of Escherichia coli strains isolated from diabetic patients in Mogadishu, Somalia.MethodsThis descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at Ummah Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, from November 2021 to April 2022. Clean catch mid-stream urine specimens were collected from each participant and uropathogens were identified using standard techniques. The samples were cultured on CLED agar and antibiotic susceptibility patterns were determined using the Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion method. Data analysis was performed using SPSS version 20.ResultsThe overall prevalence of uropathogens among diabetic patients was 236/350 (67.5%) with Escherichia coli being the most common organism. According to multivariate logistic regression, the results showed that Female diabetic patients had a significantly higher likelihood of developing UTIs compared to males (AOR = 2.5, 95% CI: 1.357–4.522, p = 0.003). The duration of diabetes, history of previous UTIs, and previous antibiotic use were also significantly associated with UTIs. All isolates were found to be resistant to Cefotaxime (100%). In addition, high resistance rates were observed with ofloxacin (91%), ciprofloxacin (77.8%), amikacin (60.9%), ceftriaxone (58.3%), and cefepime (51.8%). The most sensitive antibiotics were colistin and imipenem (99.6 and 88.6%, respectively), followed by gentamycin (70%).ConclusionThis study found a high prevalence of uropathogens and increased multi-drug resistance. Continuous surveillance is needed to monitor uropathogen prevalence and resistance rates, guiding treatment recommendations, rational prescription programs, and policy decisions

Design a new proposed route optimization scheme based NEMO-Centric MANEMO (NCM)

Route Optimization (RO) refers to any approach that optimizes the transmission of packets between a Mobile Network Node/Mobile Router and a Corresponding Node/Home Agent. RO would mean that a binding between the address of an MNN/MR and the location of the mobile network is registered at the CE/HA. Technically, route optimization mechanism comes up with a complementing solution for the pinball problem by avoiding the MRHA Bidirectional Tunnel(BT) that is to be used. This paper discusses the RO issues for NEMO and more specifically issues of Nested NEMO such astunneling redundant, HA dependency, processing delay, bottleneck, traffic congestion, ER selection, and scalability in the design consideration. In order to address NEMO ROsuboptimal, this work utilizes the NCM protocol plus to PHA. The proposed MANEMO RO scheme is a layer three solution to support RO for mobile networks. Additionally, the paper proposes the design to address Nested NEMO issues in a post disaster scenario by using Proxy Home Agent (PHA) in the infrastructure with using Neighbor Discovery protocol(TDP/NINA) for localizing communications. Thus, thesignaling message flow and the algorithm are written to give proposed scheme more flexibilit

A Comparison between single-dose pregabalin and magnesium sulfate in induced hypotension during functional endoscopic sinus surgery: A prospective randomized double-blinded study

Background: Functional Endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) is a surgical intervention during which controlled hypotension can improve visibility. Magnesium sulfate is used for controlled hypotension. Pregabalin is also effective in hypotensive anesthesia. Objectives: This study aimed to detect the effect of single preoperative oral pregabalin versus intravenous magnesium sulfate to facilitate induced hypotension during functional endoscopic sinus surgery. Patients and methods: In a randomized, double-blind, prospective study, 60 patients of either sex were divided into 2 equal groups. Group P received an oral pregabalin capsule of 150 mg 30 minutes before general anesthesia. Group M received a single-dose 2 grams of magnesium sulfate 30 minutes before induction of anesthesia. The primary outcome was the total intraoperative consumption of nitroglycerin required to maintain the mean arterial blood pressure (MAP) at the range of 55– 65 mmHg. The secondary outcomes were the quality of the surgical field assessed by the Fromm and Boezaart grading scale, surgeon satisfaction assessed by the five-point Likert scale, and the visual analog pain scores (VAS). Results: The pregabalin group P showed statistically significant lower nitroglycerine doses (1.3±1.2 mg) compared to group M (3.3±1.5 mg) with a P value of <0.001. The surgical field quality and the surgeon satisfaction scales showed statistically significant better scores in group P (1.7±0.6 and 5±0.6 respectively) than in group M (3.2±0.9 and 2.1±0.6 respectively) with P values of (0.023 and 0.001 respectively). The VAS showed statistically significant lower scores in group P (1.3±0.9) compared with group M (3.4±0.6) with a p value= 0.001. Conclusion: A single preoperative pregabalin dose was more effective than magnesium sulfate in reducing the total intraoperative consumption of nitroglycerin. It also provides a dryer surgical field that achieves better surgeon satisfaction and provides postoperative analgesia

Numerical analysis of manemo routing scheme in multihoming environment

NEMO-BSP is the result of MIPV6 development that lacks mobility support in NEMO. Therefore, in this letter we discuss MANEMO routing and multihoming (MROM) providing detailed analysis with a numerical model. MROM, by maximizing the handoff performance, has been justified to have better mobility support than the ordinary NEMO-BSP and P-NEMO

MROM scheme to improve handoff performance in mobile networks

Mobile Router (MR) mobility supported by Network Mobility Basic Support Protocol (NEMO BS) is a Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) extension that supports Host Mobility. Proposed Multihoming and Route Optimization for MANEMO (MROM) scheme is designed to provide Route Optimization (RO) and Multihomed in NEMO architectures. This paper proposes two novel schemes; MANEMO routing scheme and Multihoming-based scheme. These are to provide support for next generation networks. The proposed MROM scheme differs from other schemes for NEMO environment because it considers the requirements of more application flows parameters as packet lost delivery, handoff delay as well as throughput). Another difference is that not only the network infrastructure can begin the functionality of flow routing, but also an Edge Mobile Router (EMR) can do this flow for routing. Moreover, it utilizes the state of the art and presently active access network to perform the separation of each flow in mobile network. Thus, proposed MROM exhibits multihoming features and improves handoff performance by initiating flow-based fast registration process in NEMO environment. A handoff method is proposed with enhanced functionalities of the Local Mobility Anchors (LMA), Mobile Routers (MRs) and signaling messages with a view to achieve continuous connectivity through handoff in NEMO. Both analytical and simulation approaches are used. Analytical evaluation is carried out to analyze packet delivery lost and handoff delay of our proposed scheme. It was also shown that cost of signaling messages and packet delivery are contributing to total handoff cost. At the simulation part, network simulator 3 (NS 3) has been used as the tool to get performance metrics that have been considered like packet delivery ratio, handoff delay, and packet loss. Our proposed scheme (MROM) has been benchmarking to the standard NEMO BS Protocol and P-NEMO. In this paper, we discuss proposed MROM for next generation networks, providing detailed analysis with a numerical model, proposed MROM, by maximizing the handoff performance, has been justified to have better mobility support than the ordinary NEMO BS Protocol and PNEMO. Keywords—MROM, MANEMO, RO, Multihomed, Handoff

Properties of biomineralization process in various types of soil and their limitations

Weak and problematic soils affect stability and safety of structures founded on them. The problems occur due to limitation or absence of shear strength or over shear stress applied on the soil during loading which then lead to large settlement and consequently failure to the founded structures. Replacing the soil with better materials would be very costly as these types of soil are normally extended to a great depth under the ground surface. The proposed solution for such kind of soils is curing weak soils instead of replacing them. One of the proposed treatment methods is bio-grouting in which the conditions and the scales of the application differs according to the soil types and limitations. Reviews on previous researches have shown that treatment results by bio-grouting method are controlled by several factors , such as size of pores, value of pH, duration of treatment, presence of water and electro-kinetic effect, which give impact to treatment results quality and quantity. The outcome can go as far as killing the bacteria which then reduce the microbial growth if it was not controlled. Understanding of bio-grouting process and its application will help in improving the engineering properties of the weak soils and its applications