A novel way for whey: cheese whey fermentation produces an effective and environmentally-safe alternative to chlorine

Cheese whey has been described as an environmental hazard due to its high organic content. Although it has been suggested that whey can be used as food disinfectant, it continues to pose an environmental problem because it still contains a high organic load. Here, we aimed to develop a low-cost, scalable fermentation protocol to produce a disinfectant from dairy waste that has very little organic content and high levels of lactic acid. Fermentation was achieved with industrial whey from ewe, goat, and cow’s milk, using a specific mesophilic-lactic acid bacteria starter mix over 120 h, which yielded the highest lactic acid production and the lowest lactose content. Antibacterial activity was observed against Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella enterica, and Escherichia coli O157:H7, plus a total of thirteen other food pathogenic and spoilage strains, and antibacterial activities were determined to be highest after 120 h. We further validated this whey’s application as a disinfectant in shredded lettuce and compared its e cacy to that of chlorine, evaluating microbial quality, texture, color, and sensory perception, pH, and O2 and CO2 determinations. Results showed that not only was microbial quality better when using our whey solution (p < 0.05), but also the quality indicators for whey were statistically similar to those treated with chlorine. Hence, our work validates the use of an industrial waste whey as a low-cost, e cient, and environmentally safe disinfectant, with potential applications for minimally processed foodstu s as an alternative to chlorineinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Half-BPS cosmic string in N=2 supergravity in the presence of a dilaton

We construct new half-BPS cosmic string solutions in D=4 N=2 supergravity compatible with a consistent truncation to N=1 supergravity where they describe D-term cosmic strings. The constant Fayet-Iliopoulos term in the N=1 D-term is not put in by hand but is geometrically engineered by a gauging in the mother N=2 supergravity theory. The coupling of the N=2 vector multiplets is characterized by a cubic prepotential admitting an axion-dilaton field, a common property of many compactifications of string theory. The axion-dilaton field survives the truncation to N=1 supergravity. On the string configuration the BPS equations constrain the dilaton to be an arbitrary constant. All the cosmic string solutions with different values of the dilaton have the same energy per unit length but different lenght scales.Comment: 52 pages; typos correcte

Distribution of Energy-Momentum in a Schwarzschild-Quintessence Space-time Geometry

An analysis of the energy-momentum localization for a four-dimensional\break Schwarzschild black hole surrounded by quintessence is presented in order to provide expressions for the distributions of energy and momentum. The calculations are performed by using the Landau-Lifshitz and Weinberg energy-momentum complexes. It is shown that all the momenta vanish, while the expression for the energy depends on the mass $M$ of the black hole, the state parameter $w_{q}$ and the normalization factor $c$. The special case of $w_{q}=-2/3$ is also studied, and two limiting cases are examined.Comment: 9 page

Targeting Tyrosine Phosphatases by 3-Bromopyruvate Overcomes Hyperactivation of Platelets from Gastrointestinal Cancer Patients

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is one of the most common causes of cancer related mortality. It has been speculated that hypercoagulation in cancer patients is triggered by direct or indirect contact of platelets with tumor cells, however the underlying molecular mechanisms involved are currently unknown. Unraveling these mechanisms may provide potential avenues for preventing platelet-tumor cell aggregation. Here, we investigated the role of protein tyrosine phosphatases in the functionality of platelets in both healthy individuals and patients with gastrointestinal cancer, and determined their use as a target to inhibit platelet hyperactivity. This is the first study to demonstrate that platelet agonists selectively activate low molecular weight protein tyrosine phosphatase (LMWPTP) and PTP1B, resulting in activation of Src, a tyrosine kinase known to contribute to several platelet functions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these phosphatases are a target for 3-bromopyruvate (3-BP), a lactic acid analog currently investigated for its use in the treatment of various metabolic tumors. Our data indicate that 3-BP reduces Src activity, platelet aggregation, expression of platelet activation makers and platelet-tumor cell interaction. Thus,

Treatable traits in the European U-BIOPRED adult asthma cohorts

No abstract availabl

An investigation of the potential application of chitosan/aloe-based membranes for regenerative medicine

A significant number of therapeutics derived from natural polymers and plants have been developed to replace or to be used in conjunction with existing dressing products. The use of the therapeutic properties of aloe vera could be very useful in the creation of active wound dressing materials. The present work was undertaken to examine issues concerning structural features, topography, enzymatic degradation behavior, antibacterial activity and cellular response of chitosan/aloe vera-based membranes. The chitosan/aloe vera-based membranes that were developed displayed satisfactory degradation, roughness, wettability and mechanical properties. A higher antibacterial potency was displayed by the blended membranes. Moreover, in vitro assays demonstrated that these blended membranes have good cell compatibility with primary human dermal fibroblasts. The chitosan/aloe vera-based membranes might be promising wound dressing materials.The authors acknowledge financial support from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (grants SFRH/BPD/45307/2008 and SFRH/BD/64601/2009), the "Fundo Social Europeu", and the "Programa Diferencial de Potencial Humano". This work was partially supported by the FEDER through POCTEP 0330_IBEROMARE_1_P

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results