Needs and difficulties of food businesses in the substantiation of health and nutrition claims

The food industry has been struggling with existing guidance on how to prepare health claim dossiers. Hence the EU-funded project PATHWAY-27 seeks to provide a more tailored guidance.Within this project, robust guidelines for the food industry will be developed. The guidelines will be applicable to bioactives and bioactive enriched foods in general, to facilitate health claim documentation and dossiers.Based on a questionnaire, information on the needs and difficulties of the food industry in reaching the requirements established by the national and EU authorities (EFSA) was gathered. Particular emphasis was placed on scientific, economic, technical and technological barriers

Characterization of clastic sedimentary enviroments by clustering algorithm and several statistical approaches — case study, Sava Depression in Northern Croatia

Abstract This study demonstrates a method to identify and characterize some facies of turbiditic depositional environments. The study area is a hydrocarbon field in the Sava Depression (Northern Croatia). Its Upper Miocene reservoirs have been proved to represent a lacustrine turbidite system. In the workflow, first an unsupervised neural network was applied as clustering method for two sandstone reservoirs. The elements of the input vectors were the basic petrophysical parameters. In the second step autocorrelation surfaces were used to reveal the hidden anisotropy of the grid. This anisotropy is supposed to identify the main continuity directions in the geometrical analyses of sandstone bodies. Finally, in the description of clusters several parametric and nonparametric statistics were used to characterize the identified facies. Obtained results correspond to the previously published interpretation of those reservoir facies

Sensitive detection of aflatoxin B1 molecules on gold SPR chip surface using functionalized gold nanoparticles

Due to the warm and favourably humid climate of Southern Hungary, the maize is one of the most important crops. The protection against crop damage caused by fusarium and Aspergillus species is essential. Detection of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) molecules in cereal crops by selective sensors is important, while they can cause serious diseases in humans and animals if they enter the food chain. Our main objective was to develop selective AFB1 sensor with increased sensitivity applying βCD-functionalized gold nanoparticles (AuβCD NPs) in surface plasmon resonance (SPR) measuring apparatus. The nanoparticles ca. 10 nm in diameter were prepared in the presence of thiol-modified cyclodextrin. The adsorption isotherms of AFB1 on bare, thiol-modified cyclodextrin and AuβCD NPs covered Au film surface were calculated using SPR platform. The AFB1 concentration can be quantitatively determined in the 0.001–23.68 ng/mL range. The AuβCD NPs were found to be highly sensitive and exhibited a remarkably low limit of detection (LOD; 1 pg/mL) without using other analytical reagents

Needs and difficulties of food businesses in the substantiation of health and nutrition claims

The food industry has been struggling with existing guidance on how to prepare health claim dossiers. Hence the EU-funded project PATHWAY-27 seeks to provide a more tailored guidance. Within this project, robust guidelines for the food industry will be developed. The guidelines will be applicable to bioactives and bioactive enriched foods in general, to facilitate health claim documentation and dossiers. Based on a questionnaire, information on the needs and difficulties of the food industry in reaching the requirements established by the national and EU authorities (EFSA) was gathered. Particular emphasis was placed on scientific, economic, technical and technological barriers

A combinatorial approach to the elastic response of electrospun mats: Architectural framework and single fiber properties

Electrospun is a unique class of porous and heterogeneous materials with multi-length-scales constituents that offer a rich variety of surface functionalities to serve a host of applications. Upscaling the electrospun materials from the laboratory to the industry is often limited by the lack of understanding of their mechanical properties. Herein, we developed a theoretical framework to predict the elastic constants of the electrospun mats that hinges on the concept of elastic properties of constituent fibers, three-dimensional (3D) alignment of fibers, and local fiber curvature. Enabled by continuum-based micromechanical approaches, this framework successfully pre-dicted the elastic moduli regardless of bead-string morphology and local architectural heterogeneities present within the electrospun mats. The 3D fiber orientation distribution obtained using X-ray nano-computed tomography (nanoCT) analysis served as a key input for the validation of the analytical model. In general, the predicted elastic moduli are in reasonably good agreement with the experimental data of randomly oriented and preferentially aligned polylactic acid (PLA)-based electrospun mats. To demonstrate our analytical model's versatility and reliability, another set of PA6(3)-based electrospun mats has been chosen from the literature for validation purposes. The parametric analysis has been performed to provide a roadmap to improve the elastic moduli of electrospun mats and justify the assumed values of some of the key attributes