Extracción de aceite, carotenos y tococromanoles del fruto de palma aceitera (Elaeis guineensis) con propano subcrítico

This work aims to screen the extraction of oil and bioactive compounds including carotenes and tocochromanols from oil palm fruit with subcritical propane and without using a cosolvent. The overall extraction curves of palm oil with subcritical propane were studied and compared to those extracted with supercritical carbon dioxide. Carotenes and tocochromanols were evaluated not only in the extracted oil, but also in the oil of residual fiber in order to calculate the efficiency to recover these valuable compounds. The experimental results showed that oil yield of up to 70 % could be obtained within 120 minutes with subcritical propane at 50 bar and a flow rate of 35 kg·h−1·kg−1. It was also shown that compressed propane is an excellent solvent for the extraction of oil enriched in carotenes and tocochromanols. Subcritical propane extraction can be used as an alternative process for the simultaneous recovery of these valuable minor components from palm fruit.Este trabajo tiene como objetivo evaluar la extracción de aceite y compuestos bioactivos, incluidos los carotenos y tococromanoles, del fruto de la palma aceitera mediante propano subcrítico sin usar codisolventes. Se estudiaron las curvas generales de extracción de aceite de palma con propano subcrítico y se compararon con las extraídas con dióxido de carbono supercrítico. Se evaluaron carotenos y tococromanoles no solo en el aceite extraído, sino también en el aceite de fibra residual para calcular la eficiencia de recuperación de estos valiosos compuestos. Los resultados experimentales mostraron que se podía obtener un rendimiento de aceite de hasta el 70 % en 120 minutos con propano subcrítico a 50 bares y un caudal de 35 kg·h−1·kg−1. También se demostró que el propano comprimido es un excelente solvente para la extracción de aceite enriquecido en carotenos y tococromanoles. La extracción con propano subcrítico se puede utilizar como un proceso alternativo para la recuperación simultánea de estos valiosos componentes menores del fruto de la palma

Effects of Cooking Methods on the Changes of Total Anthocyanins, Phenolics Content and Physical Characteristics of Purple-Fleshed Sweet Potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) Grown in Vietnam

Total anthocyanin content (TAC) and total phenolics in “Nhật tím” purple-fleshed sweet potato (PFSP) variety were analyzed as affected by four cooking methods: steaming, baking, roasting, and frying. Moisture content (%), core flesh temperature (oC) and color characteristics of cooked PFSP were evaluated. TAC in steamed, fried (skin-on), roasted, baked, and fried (skin-off) PFSP were 234.18; 217.14; 208.11; 195.25; 173.68 mg/100g dry weight (DW), respectively. Under the same cooking time, steaming was good for the retention of total phenolics and anthocyanins as compared with baking. Cooking by steaming, roasting, baking, skin-on or skin-off frying produced significant increase (P ≤ 0.05) of TAC and total phenolics as compared to the respective fresh samples. Steaming resulted in the greatest increase of TAC whereas skin-on frying showed a good cooking method to retain high total phenolics (826.47 mg GAE/100g DW) in shred PFSP

Effect of Non-thermal Plasma on Physicochemical Properties of Nam Dok Mai Mango

Mango is considered as a popular and economically important tropical fruit around the world because of its attractive color, favorable flavor, and high nutritional quality. Nowadays, more consumers consciously desire not only fresh and nutritious but also safe fruits with low or free of microorganisms and chemical contamination. Non-thermal plasma (NTP) is one of the emerging technologies that could potentially decontaminate the fresh food and food processing surfaces. Recently, NTP emerges as a new sanitizing method in the agro-industrial application, where the qualitative characteristics of the treated product could probably be modified by the reactive species as well as the residues of oxidation processes. This study evaluates the changes of physicochemical indexes of Nam Dok Mai mango treated with several NTP conditions. The NTP process was discharged in 0.05 % sodium bicarbonate solution under different voltage levels (800-1500 V) and various treatment durations (2-10 min). It was found that there were significant decreases (p<0.05) in titratable acidity and total phenolic content of NTP treated mango, while the total soluble solid showed a significant increase (p<0.05). The color and texture parameters of this fruit with NTP treatments were not significantly different (p>0.05). The results demonstrated that NTP had slight effect on the physicochemical properties of mango. Future work is required to investigate more comprehensive effect of NTP on the pesticides residues in the mango

Screening of Fungal Strains Grown in Solid-state Culture for Production of Pectinase from Coffee Husk

Eighty percent of Vietnamese coffee production can be found in Central Highlands (Tay Nguyen). This paper describes a screening of fungi strains isolated from coffee husk waste collected in Dak Lak province, Tay Nguyen, for pectinase production. It was found that 17 different fungi strains were isolated from samples of 11 coffee farms. Among them. there were only 9 trains which could hydrolyze pectin. The diameter of the hydrolysis halo around fungi colonies in Pectinase Screening Agar Medium (PSAM) was measured as an indicator to assess the pectinase activity. Phylogenetic analysis based on 28S rRNA gene sequences showed that detected Rhizopus oryzae. Aspergillus oryzae and Hypocrea pseudokoningii were those giving the largest holo zones. Hypocrea pseudokoningii presented the best pectinase activity of 657.16 UI/g and was chosen for biomass production to collect enzyme. In a further study, effect of rice bran addition to coffee husk and moisture of culture medium on the spore yield of Hypocrea pseudokoningii were investigated. Using coffee husk medium with 23% rice bran addition and 65% moisture at ambient temperature, the highest spore yield of 9.2 x108 spores/g was found after incubation for 168 hours. The fungi biomass product was dried at 40oC for 54 hours to obtain the final moisture of 12% and spore survival of 5.9 x108 spores/g. 

Program Development During Fiscal Crisis: A Community/University Response

This article discusses the often difficult and challenging process of setting up a new academic department, especially during a time of budget crisis. Furthermore it examines the role and purpose of the university, the place of so-called applied programs within the university, curriculum development of a new program, racial and cultural diversity at the university, and the overall relevance of the university as a vehicle for addressing community needs. The paper concludes with a discussion on how a Social Work faculty was able to use the university\u27s mission to persuade its leadership into setting up a Social Work Department

Enriching Biomedical Knowledge for Vietnamese Low-resource Language Through Large-Scale Translation

Biomedical data and benchmarks are highly valuable yet very limited in low-resource languages other than English such as Vietnamese. In this paper, we make use of a state-of-the-art translation model in English-Vietnamese to translate and produce both pretrained as well as supervised data in the biomedical domains. Thanks to such large-scale translation, we introduce ViPubmedT5, a pretrained Encoder-Decoder Transformer model trained on 20 million translated abstracts from the high-quality public PubMed corpus. ViPubMedT5 demonstrates state-of-the-art results on two different biomedical benchmarks in summarization and acronym disambiguation. Further, we release ViMedNLI - a new NLP task in Vietnamese translated from MedNLI using the recently public En-vi translation model and carefully refined by human experts, with evaluations of existing methods against ViPubmedT5

A UVB Wavelength Dependency for Local Suppression of Recall Immunity in Humans Demonstrates a Peak at 300nm

UVB radiation is a potent environmental carcinogen that not only causes mutations in the skin but also profoundly suppresses skin immune responses. Although this UVB-induced suppression of antitumor immunity has a key role in skin cancer development, the wavelengths within UVB causing greatest in vivo immunosuppression in humans are as yet unknown. We have identified a wavelength dependency for immunosuppression in humans across the UVB spectrum. We established linear dose–response curves for UV-induced local suppression of recall contact hypersensitivity responses at four wavelengths between 289 and 322nm and found peak immune suppressive effectiveness at 300nm and no detectable suppression at 322nm within a physiologically relevant dose range