Development of a Range of Encapsulated Milk Fat Products

End of Project ReportThe aims of this research were to determine the effects of milk composition (fat, whey protein, lactose and salts) and process (homogenisation) factors on the formation of emulsions and microencapsulated powder particles and to relate these to the properties of the powder, especially susceptibility to fat oxidation. The effect of composition, using sodium caseinate and lactose on the production of high fat powders was also studied. Finally, new developments in microencapsulated milk powders were undertaken in collaboration with industry using sodium caseinate and lactose. Overall, the microencapsulation process should provide a technique to extend the shelf-life of sensitive fats and flavours and to produce high fat powders for a range of end-uses. The major components of the emulsions used to make the microencapsulated powders influenced fat globule diameter and stability, but the minor salt components also affected globule size and stability. Free flowing high fat (70%) powders with sodium caseinate and lactose as encapsulants were manufactured using a tall-form Niro spray dryer with fluidised beds. A flavoured ingredient using a by-product flavoured fat as the flavour agent was made using the same encapsulants. Microencapsulated powders were incorporated into baked goods as multi-functional ingredients. They increased loaf volumes and improved handling and processability of the dough, thereby extending the product range for fat and other dairy ingredients used for baking. Microencapsulated 80% fat blends were manufactured for biscuit formulations to overcome the handling problems associated with bulk fats. This sub-project also gave rise to a leading role in a EU FAIR project on the microencapsulation of fish oil for use in functional foods using milk components as the sole encapsulants.Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marin

Cooperative Decision Making : a methodology based on collective preferences aggregation

National audienceThe benefice of a collective decisions process mainly rests upon the possibility for the participants to confront their respective points of views. To this end, they must have cognitive and technical tools that ease the sharing of the reasons that motivate their own preferences, while accounting for information and feelings they should keep for their own. The paper presents the basis of such a cooperative decision making methodology that allows sharing information by accurately distinguishing the components of a decision and the steps of its elaboration

Numerical and experimental assessment of the modal curvature method for damage detection in plate structures

This paper is concerned with the use of numerically obtained modal curvatures for damage detection in both isotropic and composite laminated plates. Numerical simulations are carried out by using COMSOL Multiphysics as FEM solver of the governing equations, in which a Mindlin-Reissner plate model is assumed and defects are introduced as localized smoothed variations of the baseline (healthy) configuration. Experiments are also performed on steel and aluminum plates using scanning laser vibrometry. This study confirms that the central difference method greatly amplifies the measurement errors and its application leads to ineffective predictions for damage detection, even after denoising. As a consequence, different numerical techniques should be explored to allow the use of numerically obtained modal curvatures for structural health monitoring. Herein, the Savitzky-Golay filter (or least-square smoothing filter) is considered for the numerical differentiation of noisy data

Numerical and experimental assessment of the modal curvature method for damage detection in plate structures

Use of modal curvatures obtained from modal displacement data for damage detection in isotropic and composite laminated plates is addressed through numerical examples and experimental tests. Numerical simulations are carried out employing COMSOL Multiphysics as finite element solver of the equations governing the Mindlin-Reissner plate model. Damages are introduced as localized non-smooth variations of the bending stiffness of the baseline (healthy) configuration. Experiments are also performed on steel and aluminum plates using scanning laser vibrometry. The obtained results confirm that use of the central difference method to compute modal curvatures greatly amplifies the measurement errors and its application leads to unreliable predictions for damage detection, even after denoising. Therefore, specialized ad hoc numerical techniques must be suitably implemented to enable structural health monitoring via modal curvature changes. In this study, the Savitzky-Golay filter (also referred to as least-square smoothing filter) is considered for the numerical differentiation of noisy data. Numerical and experimental results show that this filter is effective for the reliable computation of modal curvature changes in plate structures due to defects and/or damages

'Digital by Default' and the 'hard to reach': Exploring solutions to digital exclusion in remote rural areas

Williams, F., Philip, L., Fairhurst, G., & Farrington, J. (2016). ‘Digital by Default’ and ‘the hard to reach’: exploring solutions to digital exclusion in remote rural areas. Local Economy, 31(7), 757-777. DOI: 10.1177/0269094216670938. Copyright © 2016 SAGE. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.In the UK, the geography of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure required for Internet connectivity is such that high speed broadband and mobile phone networks are generally less available in rural areas compared with urban areas or, in other words, as remoteness and population sparsity increase so too does the likelihood of an area having no or very poor broadband connectivity. Against a policy backdrop of UK Government efforts to bring forward network infrastructure upgrades and to improve the accessibility of broadband services in locations where there is a weak commercial investment case, this paper considers the options for the ‘final few’ in the prevailing ‘Digital by Default’ public services context. The paper outlines the Rural Public Access WiFi Services project, a study focused upon enabling Internet connectivity for commercially ‘hard to reach’ rural areas in the UK. The Rural Public Access WiFi Services concept and the experiment are introduced before findings from a pilot deployment of a broadband service to households in a remote rural area, who may be classified as ‘digitally excluded’, are presented. The paper then reflects on our field experiment and the potential of the Rural Public Access WiFi Services model as a solution to overcoming some of the digital participation barriers manifest in the urban–rural divide. Early indications show that the Rural Public Access WiFi Services model has the potential to encourage participation in the Digital Economy and could aid the UK Government’s Digital by Default agenda, although adoption of the model is not without its challenges

Professor Mark Wainberg

When Kuan-Teh Jeang (‘Teh’ to everyone) made the bold and prescient decision to join the earliest wave of pure online academic publishing and founded the journal Retrovirology, Mark Wainberg was one of the simplest and most obvious choices for him to invite to join the editorial team. Mark’s long established and highly respected position in the field of HIV and AIDS research added enormously to the embryonic journal’s immediate credibility and stature. Mark’s seminal achievements in recent years have been in antiretroviral therapy and viral resistance mechanisms but, in a publishing career on HIV spanning 30 years and over 550 publications, there were few areas of HIV research that he did not investigate and he brought that enormous range of expertise and experience to Retrovirology. His many achievements in the field will be described in detail by others, including his trainees and colleagues from Canada, in a shortly to be published obituary in this journal. When Teh himself was so sadly taken from us it was again Mark’s stature and reputation and his boundless enthusiasm and energy that was so important in maintaining the momentum and profile of the Journal as he took on the role of Co-Editor in Chief

Finding outlier light-curves in catalogs of periodic variable stars

We present a methodology to discover outliers in catalogs of periodic light-curves. We use cross-correlation as measure of ``similarity'' between two individual light-curves and then classify light-curves with lowest average ``similarity'' as outliers. We performed the analysis on catalogs of variable stars of known type from the MACHO and OGLE projects and established that our method correctly identifies light-curves that do not belong to those catalogs as outliers. We show how our method can scale to large datasets that will be available in the near future such as those anticipated from Pan-STARRS and LSST.Comment: 16 pages, 24 figure

Decomposition of Gene Expression State Space Trajectories

Representing and analyzing complex networks remains a roadblock to creating dynamic network models of biological processes and pathways. The study of cell fate transitions can reveal much about the transcriptional regulatory programs that underlie these phenotypic changes and give rise to the coordinated patterns in expression changes that we observe. The application of gene expression state space trajectories to capture cell fate transitions at the genome-wide level is one approach currently used in the literature. In this paper, we analyze the gene expression dataset of Huang et al. (2005) which follows the differentiation of promyelocytes into neutrophil-like cells in the presence of inducers dimethyl sulfoxide and all-trans retinoic acid. Huang et al. (2005) build on the work of Kauffman (2004) who raised the attractor hypothesis, stating that cells exist in an expression landscape and their expression trajectories converge towards attractive sites in this landscape. We propose an alternative interpretation that explains this convergent behavior by recognizing that there are two types of processes participating in these cell fate transitions—core processes that include the specific differentiation pathways of promyelocytes to neutrophils, and transient processes that capture those pathways and responses specific to the inducer. Using functional enrichment analyses, specific biological examples and an analysis of the trajectories and their core and transient components we provide a validation of our hypothesis using the Huang et al. (2005) dataset

Modification of proteolytic activity matrix analysis (PrAMA) to measure ADAM10 and ADAM17 sheddase activities in cell and tissue lysates

Increases in expression of ADAM10 and ADAM17 genes and proteins have been evaluated, but not validated as cancer biomarkers. Specific enzyme activities better reflect enzyme cellular functions, and might be better biomarkers than enzyme genes or proteins. However, no high throughput assay is available to test this possibility. Recent studies have developed the high throughput real-time proteolytic activity matrix analysis (PrAMA) that integrates the enzymatic processing of multiple enzyme substrates with mathematical-modeling computation. The original PrAMA measures with significant accuracy the activities of individual metalloproteinases expressed on live cells. To make the biomarker assay usable in clinical practice, we modified PrAMA by testing enzymatic activities in cell and tissue lysates supplemented with broad-spectrum non-MP enzyme inhibitors, and by maximizing the assay specificity using systematic mathematical-modeling analyses. The modified PrAMA accurately measured the absence and decreases of ADAM10 sheddase activity (ADAM10sa) and ADAM17sa in ADAM10-/- and ADAM17-/- mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs), and ADAM10- and ADAM17-siRNA transfected human cancer cells, respectively. It also measured the restoration and inhibition of ADAM10sa in ADAM10-cDNA-transfected ADAM10-/- MEFs and GI254023X-treated human cancer cell and tissue lysates, respectively. Additionally, the modified PrAMA simultaneously quantified with significant accuracy ADAM10sa and ADAM17sa in multiple human tumor specimens, and showed the essential characteristics of a robust high throughput multiplex assay that could be broadly used in biomarker studies. Selectively measuring specific enzyme activities, this new clinically applicable assay is potentially superior to the standard protein- and gene-expression assays that do not distinguish active and inactive enzyme forms