5,194 research outputs found
Septal Pore Apparatus Ultrastructure in Tremella Foliacea Pers. Ex Fr. and Tremellodon Gelatinosum (Scop.) Pers.
SUMMARYMost Basidiomycetes are characterized by dolipores with parenthesomes that are multiperforate, imperforate or pauciperforate. Electron micrographs of Tremellae, however, show dolipore septa with banded material in the orifices and vesiculate parenthesomes. We have studied the fine structure of Tremella foliacea Pers. ex Fr. and Tremellodon gelatinosum (Scop.) Pers. In these two species we describe several considerable differences which question the phylogeny suggested by some authors, within the Basidiomycetes. Ultrastructural similarities found in the dolipore of Tremella foliacea and in the pore of a few Ascomycetes could suggest that the most primitive dolipore is the Tremella-type
Human Breast Milk: A Source of Potential Probiotic Candidates
This study focuses on the isolation of lactobacilli/bifidobacteria from human breast milk and their first characterization, in the perspective to find new probiotic candidates to be included in food products. More specifically, breast-milk-isolated strains demonstrated a very good aptitude to adhere to intestinal cells, in comparison with L. rhamnosus GG strain, taken as reference. The same behavior has been found for hydrophobicity/auto-aggregation properties. A remarkable antagonistic activity was detected for these isolates not only against spoilage and pathogenic species of food interest, but also against the principal etiological agents of intestinal infections. Indeed, isolated strains impaired spoilage and pathogenic species growth, as well as biofilm formation by gut pathogens. In addition, breast milk strains were characterized for their antibiotic susceptibility, displaying species-specific and strain-specific susceptibility patterns. Finally, to assess their technological potential, the fermentation kinetics and viability of breast milk strains in pasteurized milk were investigated, also including the study of the volatile molecule profiles. In this regard, all the strains pointed out the release of aroma compounds frequently associated with the sensory quality of several dairy products such as acetic acid, diacetyl, acetoin, acetaldehyde. Data here reported point up the high potential of breast-milk-isolated strains as probiotics
Exploitation of an olive oil industry by-product: olive pomace as a source of food aroma compounds
Italy is the second largest producer in the world of olive oil, preceded only by Spain. Although olive oil can be considered as a “green gold” all over the world, the treatment of its by-products is a critical aspect to cope with. Indeed, the polluting character of such by-product together with its high costs for an effective disposal strongly penalize the olive oil industry. In particular, 50 % of oil production costs depend on its waste disposal. In this context, the aim of this work was to evaluate a potential exploitation of olive pomace as a feedstock for the production of flavours of interest for the food industry
The Partial Visibility Representation Extension Problem
For a graph , a function is called a \emph{bar visibility
representation} of when for each vertex , is a
horizontal line segment (\emph{bar}) and iff there is an
unobstructed, vertical, -wide line of sight between and
. Graphs admitting such representations are well understood (via
simple characterizations) and recognizable in linear time. For a directed graph
, a bar visibility representation of , additionally, puts the bar
strictly below the bar for each directed edge of
. We study a generalization of the recognition problem where a function
defined on a subset of is given and the question is whether
there is a bar visibility representation of with for every . We show that for undirected graphs this problem
together with closely related problems are \NP-complete, but for certain cases
involving directed graphs it is solvable in polynomial time.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016
Planar Drawings of Fixed-Mobile Bigraphs
A fixed-mobile bigraph G is a bipartite graph such that the vertices of one
partition set are given with fixed positions in the plane and the mobile
vertices of the other part, together with the edges, must be added to the
drawing. We assume that G is planar and study the problem of finding, for a
given k >= 0, a planar poly-line drawing of G with at most k bends per edge. In
the most general case, we show NP-hardness. For k=0 and under additional
constraints on the positions of the fixed or mobile vertices, we either prove
that the problem is polynomial-time solvable or prove that it belongs to NP.
Finally, we present a polynomial-time testing algorithm for a certain type of
"layered" 1-bend drawings
Drawing Graphs within Restricted Area
We study the problem of selecting a maximum-weight subgraph of a given graph
such that the subgraph can be drawn within a prescribed drawing area subject to
given non-uniform vertex sizes. We develop and analyze heuristics both for the
general (undirected) case and for the use case of (directed) calculation graphs
which are used to analyze the typical mistakes that high school students make
when transforming mathematical expressions in the process of calculating, for
example, sums of fractions
How Listeria monocytogenes Shapes Its Proteome in Response to Natural Antimicrobial Compounds
The goal of this study was to investigate the adaptation of L. monocytogenes Scott A cells to treatments with sublethal doses of antimicrobials (ethanol, citral, carvacrol, E-2-hexenal and thyme essential oil). The survival of L. monocytogenes cells was not affected by the antimicrobials at the concentrations assayed, with the exception of ethanol (1% v/v) and thyme essential oil (100 mg/L), which decreased cell viability from 8.53 \ub1 0.36 to 7.20 \ub1 0.22 log CFU/mL (P = 0.04). We subsequently evaluated how L. monocytogenes regulates and shapes its proteome in response to antimicrobial compounds. Compared to the control cells grown under optimal conditions, L. monocytogenes treated for 1 h with the antimicrobial compounds showed increased or decreased ( 65 or 642-fold, respectively, P < 0.05) levels of protein synthesis for 223 protein spots. As shown multivariate clustering analysis, the proteome profiles differed between treatments. Adaptation and shaping of proteomes mainly concerned cell cycle control, cell division, chromosome, motility and regulatory related proteins, carbohydrate, pyruvate, nucleotide and nitrogen metabolism, cofactors and vitamins and stress response with contrasting responses for different stresses. Ethanol, citral (85 mg/l) or (E)-2-hexenal (150 mg/L) adapted cells increased survival during acid stress imposed under model (BHI) and food-like systems
Robustly Safe Compilation
Secure compilers generate compiled code that withstands many target-level attacks such as alteration of control flow, data leaks or memory corruption. Many existing secure compilers are proven to be fully abstract, meaning that they reflect and preserve observational equivalence. Fully abstract compilation is strong and useful but, in certain cases, comes at the cost of requiring expensive runtime constructs in compiled code. These constructs may have no relevance for security, but are needed to accommodate differences between the source and target languages that fully abstract compilation necessarily needs
Lactobacillus paracasei A13 and high-pressure homogenization stress response
Sub-lethal high-pressure homogenization treatments applied to Lactobacillus paracasei A13 demonstrated to be a useful strategy to enhance technological and functional properties without detrimental effects on the viability of this strain. Modification of membrane fatty acid composition is reported to be the main regulatory mechanisms adopted by probiotic lactobacilli to counteract high-pressure stress. This work is aimed to clarify and understand the relationship between the modification of membrane fatty acid composition and the expression of genes involved in fatty acid biosynthesis in Lactobacillus paracasei A13, before and after the application of different sub-lethal hyperbaric treatments. Our results showed that Lactobacillus paracasei A13 activated a series of reactions aimed to control and stabilize membrane fluidity in response to high-pressure homogenization treatments. In fact, the production of cyclic fatty acids was counterbalanced by the unsaturation and elongation of fatty acids. The gene expression data indicate an up-regulation of the genes accA, accC, fabD, fabH and fabZ after high-pressure homogenization treatment at 150 and 200 MPa, and of fabK and fabZ after a treatment at 200 MPa suggesting this regulation of the genes involved in fatty acids biosynthesis as an immediate response mechanism adopted by Lactobacillus paracasei A13 to high-pressure homogenization treatments to balance the membrane fluidity. Although further studies should be performed to clarify the modulation of phospholipids and glycoproteins biosynthesis since they play a crucial role in the functional properties of the probiotic strains, this study represents an important step towards understanding the response mechanisms of Lactobacillus paracasei A13 to sub-lethal high-pressure homogenization treatments
-Stars or On Extending a Drawing of a Connected Subgraph
We consider the problem of extending the drawing of a subgraph of a given
plane graph to a drawing of the entire graph using straight-line and polyline
edges. We define the notion of star complexity of a polygon and show that a
drawing of an induced connected subgraph can be extended with at
most bends per edge, where is the
largest star complexity of a face of and is the size of the
largest face of . This result significantly improves the previously known
upper bound of [5] for the case where is connected. We also show
that our bound is worst case optimal up to a small additive constant.
Additionally, we provide an indication of complexity of the problem of testing
whether a star-shaped inner face can be extended to a straight-line drawing of
the graph; this is in contrast to the fact that the same problem is solvable in
linear time for the case of star-shaped outer face [9] and convex inner face
[13].Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2018
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