The Reciprocal Interactions between Polyphenols and Gut Microbiota and Effects on Bioaccessibility

As of late, polyphenols have increasingly interested the scientific community due to their proposed health benefits. Much of this attention has focused on their bioavailability. Polyphenol–gut microbiota interactions should be considered to understand their biological functions. The dichotomy between the biotransformation of polyphenols into their metabolites by gut microbiota and the modulation of gut microbiota composition by polyphenols contributes to positive health outcomes. Although there are many studies on the in vivo bioavailability of polyphenols, the mutual relationship between polyphenols and gut microbiota is not fully understood. This review focuses on the biotransformation of polyphenols by gut microbiota, modulation of gut microbiota by polyphenols, and the effects of these two-way mutual interactions on polyphenol bioavailability, and ultimately, human health

Architectural requirements for energy efficient execution of graph analytics applications

Intelligent data analysis has become more important in the last decade especially because of the significant increase in the size and availability of data. In this paper, we focus on the common execution models and characteristics of iterative graph analytics applications. We show that the features that improve work efficiency can lead to significant overheads on existing systems. We identify the opportunities for custom hardware implementation, and outline the desired architectural features for energy efficient computation of graph analytics applications. © 2015 IEEE

A Template-Based Design Methodology for Graph-Parallel Hardware Accelerators

Graph applications have been gaining importance in the last decade due to emerging big data analytics problems such as Web graphs, social networks, and biological networks. For these applications, traditional CPU and GPU architectures suffer in terms of performance and power consumption due to irregular communications, random memory accesses, and load balancing problems. It has been shown that specialized hardware accelerators can achieve much better power and energy efficiency compared to the general purpose CPUs and GPUs. In this paper, we present a template-based methodology specifically targeted for hardware accelerator design of big-data graph applications. Important architectural features that are key for energy efficient execution are implemented in a common template. The proposed template-based methodology is used to design hardware accelerators for different graph applications with little effort. Compared to an application-specific high-level synthesis methodology, we show that the proposed methodology can generate hardware accelerators with up to 18× better energy efficiency and requires less design effort

Hardware accelerator design for data centers

As the size of available data is increasing, it is becoming inefficient to scale the computational power of traditional systems. To overcome this problem, customized application-specific accelerators are becoming integral parts of modern system on chip (SOC) architectures. In this paper, we summarize existing hardware accelerators for data centers and discuss the techniques to implement and embed them along with the existing SOCs. © 2015 IEEE

Graph Analytics Accelerators for Cognitive Systems

Hardware accelerators are known to be performance and power efficient. This article focuses on accelerator design for graph analytics applications, which are commonly used kernels for cognitive systems. The authors propose a templatized architecture that is specifically optimized for vertex-centric graph applications with irregular memory access patterns, asynchronous execution, and asymmetric convergence. The proposed architecture addresses the limitations of existing CPU and GPU systems while providing a customizable template. The authors' experiments show that the generated accelerators can outperform a high-end CPU system with up to 3 times better performance and 65 times better power efficiency. © 1981-2012 IEEE

Energy Efficient Architecture for Graph Analytics Accelerators

Specialized hardware accelerators can significantly improve the performance and power efficiency of compute systems. In this paper, we focus on hardware accelerators for graph analytics applications and propose a configurable architecture template that is specifically optimized for iterative vertex-centric graph applications with irregular access patterns and asymmetric convergence. The proposed architecture addresses the limitations of the existing multi-core CPU and GPU architectures for these types of applications. The SystemC-based template we provide can be customized easily for different vertex-centric applications by inserting application-level data structures and functions. After that, a cycle-accurate simulator and RTL can be generated to model the target hardware accelerators. In our experiments, we study several graph-parallel applications, and show that the hardware accelerators generated by our template can outperform a 24 core high end server CPU system by up to 3x in terms of performance. We also estimate the area requirement and power consumption of these hardware accelerators through physical-aware logic synthesis, and show up to 65x better power consumption with significantly smaller area. © 2016 IEEE

Are olive pomace powders a safe source of bioactives and nutrients?

"First published: 10 September 2020"BACKGROUND Olive oil industry generates significant amounts of semi-solid wastes, namely the olive pomace. Olive pomace is a by-product rich in high-value compounds (e.g. dietary fibre, unsaturated fatty acids, polyphenols) widely explored to obtain new food ingredients. However, conventional extraction methods frequently use organic solvents, while novel eco-friendly techniques have high operational costs. The development of powdered products without any extraction step has been proposed as a more feasible and sustainable approach. RESULTS The present study fractionated and valorised the liquid and pulp fraction of olive pomace obtaining two stable and safe powdered ingredients, namely a liquid-enriched powder (LOPP) and a pulp-enriched powder (POPP). These powders were characterized chemically, and their bioactivity was assessed. LOPP exhibited a significant amount of mannitol (141 g/ kg), potassium (54 g/ kg) and hydroxytyrosol/ derivatives (5 mg/g). POPP exhibited high amount of dietary fibre (620 g/ kg) associated to significant amount of bound phenolics (7.41 mg GAE/ g fibre DW) with substantial antioxidant activity. POPP also contained an unsaturated fatty acids composition similar to olive oil (76\% of total fatty acids) and showed potential as a reasonable source of protein (12 \%). Their functional properties (solubility, water-holding and oil-holding capacity), antioxidant capacity and antimicrobial activity were also assessed, and their biological safety was verified. CONCLUSION The development of olive pomace powders to apply in the food industry could be a suitable strategy to add-value to olive pomace and obtain safe multifunctional ingredients with higher health-promoting effects than dietary fibre and polyphenols itself. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.TBR thanks the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal for PhD grant SFRH/BDE/108271/2015 and the financial support of Association BLC3 – Technology and Innovation Campus. This work was supported by National Funds from FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through the project MULTIBIOREFINERY – SAICTPAC/0040/2015 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016403). We are also grateful for the scientific collaboration under the FCT project UID/Multi/50016/2019.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Burden of childhood-onset arthritis

Juvenile arthritis comprises a variety of chronic inflammatory diseases causing erosive arthritis in children, often progressing to disability. These children experience functional impairment due to joint and back pain, heel pain, swelling of joints and morning stiffness, contractures, pain, and anterior uveitis leading to blindness. As children who have juvenile arthritis reach adulthood, they face possible continuing disease activity, medication-associated morbidity, and life-long disability and risk for emotional and social dysfunction. In this article we will review the burden of juvenile arthritis for the patient and society and focus on the following areas: patient disability; visual outcome; other medical complications; physical activity; impact on HRQOL; emotional impact; pain and coping; ambulatory visits, hospitalizations and mortality; economic impact; burden on caregivers; transition issues; educational occupational outcomes, and sexuality