PENGOLAHAN DEKSTRIN SAGU (METROXYLON RUMPHII) SECARA ENZIMATIS

Sago tree (Metroxylon rumphii) is a potential source of starch and an important contributor of non timber forest products for foodstuff reserve because it has a high carbohydrate content particularly starch. The idea of converting sago starch into dextrin compound is to enhance wider use and increase the economic value of the this commodity. Dextrin has been known for its use as additives in textile industries, pulp/paper industries and pharmaceutical industries. A laboratory trial has been conducted to convert sago into dextrin harnessing the activities of particular enzymes. The aim of this trial was to figure out optimum condition of enzymatic 'sago-processing into satisfactory-quality dextrin, able to comply with the requirement of Indonesian National Standard (INS). The target is to obtain appropriate technology development in sago-derived dextrin. The result revealed that the optimum condition was obtained at substrate concentration of 25 percent with enzyme dosage at 0,9 gram per kg of substrate (dry-weight). In this condition, the dextrin solubility complies with the INS requirement; i.e 25 percent with enzyme dosage at 0,5 gram per kg of substrate (dry- weight)

Experiences with Mesh-like computations using Prediction Binary Trees

In this paper we aim at exploiting the temporal coherence among successive phases of a computation, in order to implement a load-balancing technique in mesh-like computations to be mapped on a cluster of processors. A key concept, on which the load balancing schema is built on, is the use of a Predictor component that is in charge of providing an estimation of the unbalancing between successive phases. By using this information, our method partitions the computation in balanced tasks through the Prediction Binary Tree (PBT). At each new phase, current PBT is updated by using previous phase computing time for each task as next phase's cost estimate. The PBT is designed so that it balances the load across the tasks as well as reduces {\em dependency} among processors for higher performances. Reducing dependency is obtained by using rectangular tiles of the mesh, of almost-square shape (i. e. one dimension is at most twice the other). By reducing dependency, one can reduce inter-processors communication or exploit local dependencies among tasks (such as data locality). Furthermore, we also provide two heuristics which take advantage of data-locality. Our strategy has been assessed on a significant problem, Parallel Ray Tracing. Our implementation shows a good scalability, and improves performance in both cheaper commodity cluster and high performance clusters with low latency networks. We report different measurements showing that tasks granularity is a key point for the performances of our decomposition/mapping strategy

Personalizable edge services for Web accessibility

Web Content Accessibility guidelines by W3C (W3C Recommendation, May 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/) provide several suggestions for Web designers regarding how to author Web pages in order to make them accessible to everyone. In this context, this paper proposes the use of edge services as an efficient and general solution to promote accessibility and breaking down the digital barriers that inhibit users with disabilities to actively participate to any aspect of society. The idea behind edge services mainly affect the advantages of a personalized navigation in which contents are tailored according to different issues, such as client’s devices capabilities, communication systems and network conditions and, finally, preferences and/or abilities of the growing number of users that access the Web. To meet these requirements, Web designers have to efficiently provide content adaptation and personalization functionalities mechanisms in order to guarantee universal access to the Internet content. The so far dominant paradigm of communication on the WWW, due to its simple request/response model, cannot efficiently address such requirements. Therefore, it must be augmented with new components that attempt to enhance the scalability, the performances and the ubiquity of the Web. Edge servers, acting on the HTTP data flow exchanged between client and server, allow on-the-fly content adaptation as well as other complex functionalities beyond the traditional caching and content replication services. These value-added services are called edge services and include personalization and customization, aggregation from multiple sources, geographical personalization of the navigation of pages (with insertion/emphasis of content that can be related to the user’s geographical location), translation services, group navigation and awareness for social navigation, advanced services for bandwidth optimization such as adaptive compression and format transcoding, mobility, and ubiquitous access to Internet content. This paper presents Personalizable Accessible Navigation (Pan) that is a set of edge services designed to improve Web pages accessibility, developed and deployed on top of a programmable intermediary framework. The characteristics and the location of the services, i.e., provided by intermediaries, as well as the personalization and the opportunities to select multiple profiles make Pan a platform that is especially suitable for accessing the Web seamlessly also from mobile terminals

ps4 70 anti phosphatidylserine prothrombin antibodies and cardiovascular risk in a sle cohort of patients

Introduction Clinical activity of SLE may wax and wane, but persistent, active systemic inflammation leads to organ damage and rises morbidity and mortality. Early damage is mostly related to disease activity, whereas later damage, in particular atherosclerosis, infections and malignancies are usual complications of long-standing disease and treatment with immunosuppressive agents. One of the major late causes of death in SLE is thrombosis, in particular stroke and myocardial infarction due to CAD. In these patients, the increased cardiovascular morbidity is not fully explained by traditional risk factors and this may lead to under-recognition and under-treatment. Petri, et al. proposed an equation for cardiovascular disease risk in SLE, which combines classical parameters and disease activity markers. Other scores such as the GAPSS(Global AntiPhospholipid Syndrome Score) have been recently evaluated. The importance of aPL in thrombosis in general is well defined, as they constitute the culprit of the so-called anti-phospholipid syndrome(APS). Their role in sustaining the high risk of cardiovascular complications of SLE patients is under-debated. Objective To study the role of the anti-phosphatidylserine/prothrombin(aPS/PT) antibodies, included in the GAPSS score, in contributing to the thrombotic risk of SLE patients. Methods We enrolled 172 patients from Ospedale San Raffaele. 132 patients with SLE(111/132, 84% without secondary APS, SAPS, and 21/132, 16% with SAPS), 19 with primary APS(PAPS) and 21 healthy controls. Each recruited patient was tested for aPS/PT IgG and IgM through ELISA by INOVA Diagnostic, Inc. San Diego, CA USA. Results 36/111 (32.4%) SLE without APS, 15/21 (71.4%) SAPS, 13/19 (68.4%) PAPS and 3/21 (14.3%) healthy donors were aPS/PT+. aPS/PT+SLE patients had a higher cardiovascular risk according to the Petri's score, when compared to aPS/PT-patients, irrespectively of a positive or negative history of overt APS(Mean ±SD Petri' score=20.8±18.1, 14.0±12.8 and 23.8±22.5, 11.6±9.3 respectively, p 10 had also higher prevalence of pregnancy complications. Conclusion aPS/PT antibodies are associated with a high risk of thrombosis and CAD in SLE. aPS/PT assays should be routinely introduced in the management of these patients

Restos vegetales en muestras de subsuelo, Formación Lajas, Jurásico medio, Cuenca Neuquina, Neuquén, Argentina

Se dan a conocer restos vegetales preservados como impresiones correspondientes a diferentes órganos, tales como tallos, hojas y ramas asignables a equisetópsidas, pteridospermópsidas y coníferas respecVvamente. Los mismos fueron recuperados de muestras de tesVgos coronas de la Formación Lajas, Jurásico Medio de la cuenca Neuquina, de pozos pertenecientes al área del Engolfamiento Neuquino, al norte de la Dorsal de Huincul. La Formación Lajas se describe como depósitos marinomarginales, principalmente sistemas deltaicos, compuestos por areniscas y en menor medida pelitas oscuras y verdosas con abundantes rastros carbonosos. Además de los megafósiles mencionados, se reportan numerosos restos de fitodetritos. Los fósiles vegetales fueron hallados en los niveles carbonosos asignables a ambientes de planicie deltaica, a interbarras de frente deltaico, y a barras de frente deltaico. Los procesos depositacionales en las barras de frente deltaico están dominados por procesos tracVvos, por lo cual, se infiere que algunos de los restos (tallos y ramas), corresponden a elementos resistentes a estos procesos mientras que aquellos más delicados (frondes) a ambientes de planicie deltaica, siendo depositados por suspensión en ambientes más tranquilos. Esto podría indicar la presencia de dos poblaciones vegetales, una más aun a ambiente deltaico, ya que por la buena preservación de sus partes más delicadas no evidencia transporte, y otra que representa una comunidad vegetal más conVnental-terrígena, que hubiera sufrido algún grado de transporte debido a la acción fluvial. El material estudiado se encuentra depositado en el Repositorio de material fósil de YPF Tecnología.Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Muse

The Role of Native Language and the Fundamental Design of the Auditory System in Detecting Rhythm Changes

Accepted December 13, 2018Purpose: We investigated whether rhythm discrimination is mainly driven by the native language of the listener or by the fundamental design of the human auditory system and universal cognitive mechanisms shared by all people irrespective of rhythmic patterns in their native language. Method: In multiple experiments, we asked participants to listen to 2 continuous acoustic sequences and to determine whether their rhythms were the same or different (AX discrimination). Participants were native speakers of 4 languages with different rhythmic properties (Spanish, French, English, and German) to understand whether the predominant rhythmic patterns of a native language affect sensitivity, bias, and reaction time in detecting rhythmic changes in linguistic (Experiment 2) and in nonlinguistic (Experiments 1 and 2) acoustic sequences. We examined sensitivity and bias measures, as well as reaction times. We also computed Bayes factors in order to assess the effect of native language. Results: All listeners performed better (i.e., responded faster and manifested higher sensitivity and accuracy) when detecting the presence or absence of a rhythm change when the 1st stimulus in an AX test pair exhibited regular rhythm (i.e., a syllable-timed rhythmic pattern) than when the 1st stimulus exhibited irregular rhythm (i.e., stress-timed rhythmic pattern). This result pattern was observed both on linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli and was not modulated by the native language of the participant. Conclusion: We conclude that rhythm change detection is a fundamental function of a processing system that relies on general auditory mechanisms and is not modulated by linguistic experience.The authors acknowledge support from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Grant PSI2017-82563-P (awarded to A. G. S.), the “Severo Ochoa” Programme for Centres/Units of Excellence in R&D Grant SEV-2015-490 (BCBL), and the Basque Foundation for Science Grant IKERBASQUE (awarded to A. G. S. and M. O.). D. M. G. was supported by Grant PIA/Basal FB0003 from the Chilean Research Council. L. P. was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness via Juan de la Cierva fellowship

Longitudinal analysis of blood DNA methylation identifies mechanisms of response to tumor necrosis factor inhibitor therapy in rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, immune-mediated inflammatory disease of the joints that has been associated with variation in the peripheral blood methylome. In this study, we aim to identify epigenetic variation that is associated with the response to tumor necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi) therapy.Peripheral blood genome-wide DNA methylation profiles were analyzed in a discovery cohort of 62 RA patients at baseline and at week 12 of TNFi therapy. DNA methylation of individual CpG sites and enrichment of biological pathways were evaluated for their association with drug response. Using a novel cell deconvolution approach, altered DNA methylation associated with TNFi response was also tested in the six main immune cell types in blood. Validation of the results was performed in an independent longitudinal cohort of 60 RA patients.Treatment with TNFi was associated with significant longitudinal peripheral blood methylation changes in biological pathways related to RA (FDR<0.05). 139 biological functions were modified by therapy, with methylation levels changing systematically towards a signature similar to that of healthy controls. Differences in the methylation profile of T cell activation and differentiation, GTPase-mediated signaling, and actin filament organization pathways were associated with the clinical response to therapy. Cell type deconvolution analysis identified CpG sites in CD4+T, NK, neutrophils and monocytes that were significantly associated with the response to TNFi.Our results show that treatment with TNFi restores homeostatic blood methylation in RA. The clinical response to TNFi is associated to methylation variation in specific biological pathways, and it involves cells from both the innate and adaptive immune systems.The Instituto de Salud Carlos III.Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved