Detection of Puerarin from Pueraria Mirifica Tuber and Its Formulated Cosmetic Products

Pueraria mirifica (PM) has traditionally been used to relieve postmenopausal symptoms. Recently, its extract has been developed into various cosmetic products to promote skin rejuvenation and youthfulness. This study investigated the phytochemicals of PM tuber and compared between the tuber flesh and its outer peel. Puerarin which is one of the major isoflavones and being considered as the marker compound was used to determine the presence of PM extract in local cosmetic products. Puerarin could be ionized by a mass spectrometer at both negative and positive modes. The peak ionized at the negative mode showed to have a narrower peak width (0.2 min) and higher signal-to-noise ratio (30) for pueararin (1 mg/L). The results also found PM extract contained many C- and O-glycosylated isoflavones, especially from its peel extract. This explains the peel extract showed to have four times higher antiradical activity than those of flesh extract. Puerarin from the cosmetic products was recovered via successive methanolic sonication and followed by liquid-liquid extraction using ethyl acetate. Puerarin was successfully partitioned from the highly complex chemical mixture of cosmetic products with the recovery ranged from 89.1 % to 115 %. Hence, isoflavones was found to be higher at the outer peels than its tuber flesh. A simple and reliable method has been developed to analyse the presence of PM extract in cosmetic products based on the detection of puerarin after successive extraction via methanolic sonication and ethyl acetate partition

Fungal Isolation and the Production of its Biomass in a Palm Oil Medium

A fungus which was identified to be Rhizopus arrhizus was selected as a potential microorganism for the production of biomass using a palm oil medium. Using the optimized medium composition and culture conditions (%, w/v) : palm oil, 4.0; peptone, 2.0; Mg S04' 7H20, 0.07; NaC!, 0.5; CaCI2.2H20, 0.01; Tween 20, 1.2, pH 7.0 at 37"C, agitation speed, 200 rpm and inoculum size, 1 X 104 spores/ml, a maximum biomass production and fat consumption of about 16.2 gil and 82%, respectively, were obtained. Compared to the unoptimized conditions, this is an increase of 62% and 105% in biomass production and fat consumption, respectively. Proximate analysis of the biomass revealed.that the protein and nucleic acid content were 42.8 and 2.2%, respectively. Amino acid profiles were found to be comparable to those of the FAO reference

Optimization of concentrating process using rotary vacuum evaporation for pineapple juice

Pineapple juice has high water content which limits the storage duration and increases the transportation cost. This work was aimed to optimize the concentrating process of pineapple juice using a rotary vacuum evaporation statistically. The concentrating process was varied at temperatures (50–70 °C) and time (30–120 min) at the fixed pressure, 200 mbar in 13 experimental runs. The results found that rotary vacuum evaporation was able to reduce 44.3 % water content and increase total sugar content from 7.70 to 14.65 °Brix. The significant increment of total acidity from 4.43 to 10.91 g/100 mL could be due to the presence of citric acid and other organic acids in concentrated pineapple juice. The browning index of concentrated juice was also increased from 0.101 to 0.344 with the formation of hydroxymethylfurfural (1.55 mg/mL) as byproduct. Hydroxymethylfurfural is a carcinogenic substance which usually produced automatically in carbohydrate rich foods during thermal processing. Nevertheless, the content of hydroxymethylfurfural is still far below the permittable limit of 40 mg/kg as specified for table honey. Based on the response surface methodology, the optimized concentrating parameters were 60 °C for 75 min at 200 mBar using a central composite design

PHYTOCHEMICAL EVALUATION, ANTIOXIDANT AND ANTIBACTERIAL ACTIVITY OF HOPEA PONGA (DENNST) MABBERLY EXTRACTS

Objective: The present study was aimed at evaluating the in vitro antioxidant and antibacterial activities of methanol and aqueous extracts of Hopea ponga. Methods: Hopea ponga leaf and stem sample were powdered and extracted with methanol and water. The extracts were screened for various phytochemical by HPLC and TLC studies. The total phenolic and flavonoid contents were assessed by spectrophotometric method and the antioxidant activity was estimated using 2,2 diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavening activity and inhibition of lipid peroxidation assay. Antibacterial activity was evaluated by disc diffusion method & MIC by Broth dilution method. Results: The methanol extracts exhibited significant (p <0.05) higher antioxidant activity with an IC50 value of 108µg/ml and 122 µg/ml in leaf and stem extracts respectively in the DPPH radical scavenging method, 147.2 µg/ml 136 µg/ml in the hydroxyl radical scavenging assay compared to aqueous extracts. The amount of total phenolics in methanol leaf and stem was around 286mg and 213mg gallic acid equivalent (GAE) respectively. The total flavonoid contents of methanol extracts of stem and leaf were around 108.3 mg and 86 mg catechin equivalents per gram respectively. Methanol leaf and stem extracts were found to possess maximum antibacterial activity with MIC ranging around167-648ug/ml against tested strains. High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) analysis indicated the presence of phenolic compounds such as quercetin, gallic acid, para hyroxybenzoic acid. Conclusion: The results indicate that the extracts had significant free radical scavenging and antibacterial activity. The results suggest that Hopea ponga, may be a good source of natural antioxidants and antibacterial source

The role of language and culture in face and scene processing and description strategies

Face perception is important in a variety of human social interactions, allowing us to keep track of individuals’ identities, recognise emotional expressions and intentions and make judgements about variables such as age, ethnicity and health. While early research assumed that face recognition strategies were universal, more recent studies have shown that East Asian and White Caucasian observers use different looking strategies to recognise faces, with East Asian participants focusing more on the centre of the face, which has been interpreted as representing a configural processing strategy, while White Caucasian observers fixate more on the eyes and mouth, which has been interpreted as representing a more featural processing strategy. Debate continues over the reasons behind this difference, with some researchers arguing that it represents an extension of more holistic cognition in the more collectivist East Asian cultures, and more analytic cognition in individualist Western cultures. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that cognition is bound by language, and there have been studies showing changes in response patterns in tasks conducted by bilingual participants in their different languages. Others argue that these differences in face processing are driven instead by different salient diagnostic features of faces of different ethnicity. In this thesis, I present the results of five studies examining the role of culture and facial appearance in determining the looking strategy of East Asian and White Caucasian observers. In Chapter 2, we attempted to use a Navon task to prime featural or configural processing in Malaysian Chinese observers engaged in a face recognition and description task of East Asian and White Caucasian faces. While the Navon task failed to elicit a change in either looking or description strategy, it was noted that the features fixated on most were not the features described most frequently. Further, the race of the face impacted on the looking strategy used to recognise faces, with participants fixating more on Caucasian hair than Asian hair, suggesting that the different diagnostic features may drive differences in looking strategies. It was also casually observed that observers with stronger Asian accents made more configural descriptions. In Chapter 3, I investigate the strategies used by Malaysian Chinese and White Caucasian observers when recognising and describing East Asian and White Caucasian faces. A linguistic/cultural priming paradigm was used in an attempt to induce featural or configural processing in observers. In Study 1, the East Asian observers’ eye movements were impacted by the race of the faces, making more fixations on Caucasian hair and eyes than on Asian hair and eyes. Again, patterns of looking and description were very different. Also, the description patterns differed by language, with participants making more descriptions of hair when speaking English and more descriptions of noses when speaking Chinese, suggesting that descriptions may be constrained by language. In Study 2, White Austrian Caucasian observers again showed very different description and fixation patterns. Observers again showed different fixation patterns for Asian and Caucasian faces, fixating more on Caucasian hair than Asian hair, suggesting that fixation pattern may be driven by the diagnostic features of the faces. Observers made more descriptions in German than in English, but did not show a difference in the pattern of describing different facial features depending on either the language spoken or the race of face, suggesting that the more similar German and English languages have similar constraints. Asian observers have been previously shown to direct more attention to contextual information in images of scenes than Caucasian observers, possibly due to a more holistic/configural cognitive style. Since it is known that faces are processed in a different way to other stimuli, in Chapter 4, I report the results of two studies investigating the impact of linguistic/cultural priming on participants’ eye movements and descriptions when describing street scenes. The Malaysian Chinese participants made more fixations on, and descriptions of, nonfocal than focal objects in Asian street scenes and when speaking Chinese, but not when describing European scenes in English. The White Austrian Caucasian observers did not show any difference in fixation or description patterns depending on linguistic condition, other than making more descriptions overall in German than in English. This suggests that, in a non-face description task, linguistic/cultural priming was successful in eliciting cultural “frame shifting” in Malaysian Chinese participants speaking English and Chinese, but not in Austrian Caucasian participants speaking the culturally more similar English and German. We conclude that culture/language does impact on description patterns in face and scene stimuli, possibly reflecting the constraints of different languages. Further, an impact of linguistic/cultural priming was found on fixation patterns in street scene stimuli. However, in face perception tasks, race of face, but not cultural/linguistic condition, impacted on fixation patterns. We conclude that, while language and culture may have an impact on cognition, and place constraints on descriptions, the diagnostic features of faces appear to primarily determine the fixation patterns on face stimuli

EFFECTS OF ALKALINE PRE-IMPREGNATION AND PULPING ON MALAYSIA CULTIVATED KENAF (HIBISCUS CANNABINUS

This study was carried out to identify an appropriate alkaline pulping condition for Malaysia cultivated kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus L.). The chemical composition of the kenaf bast and core fibers, and also whole stalk with different growing time were examined prior to pulping attempts. The results of various soda-AQ pulping showed that the degree of carbohydrate degradation and delignification increased with the increase of active alkali and cooking temperature, but decreased with the increase of liquor to material (L:M) ratio. The most satisfactory properties of pulp and handsheets from bast could be attained by employing soda-AQ pulping with 19.4% active alkali, 0.10% AQ, and L:M ratio of 7:1 cooked for 2 hours at 160˚C. Besides, it was also found that a mild alkaline pre-impregnation prior pulping improved the pulp viscosity and handsheets’ strength properties, especially the tensile index and folding endurance effectively. Moreover, among the three alkaline pulping processes—kraft, kraft-AQ, and soda-AQ—the results of pulp and handsheet properties showed that the soda-AQ pulp was comparable or even slightly of higher quality than the kraft pulps. Between the unbeaten bast and core soda-AQ handsheets, the strength properties of the core were higher than the bast, as the thin-walled core fibers exhibited much better conformability than the thick-walled bast fibers

An Action Design Research on development and deployment of a computer-based group discussion support tool for achieving consensus and culture change at an educational institution

Organisational culture change is a long and complex process that typically takes years to complete and has a very low success rate. This project addresses the problem by the proposed use of an Action Design Research Methodology to build and deploy an IT artifact named Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument-Spilter (OCAI-Spilter) to speed up cultural change while reducing failure rate. OCAI-Spilter should be able to fast-track culture change by addressing the problem of scalability and process losses encountered in most change projects involving large numbers of people. We used an iterative prototyping process to continuously refine the tool in use. We also reviewed the design principles in Action Research Design to improve the usability of the tool. New design principles and learning were derived from this process. Finally, we showed the effectiveness of the artifact by measuring the results of the tool in use through culture surveys and alignment, as well as idea generation that was administered through the tool

Kinetic and reactor modelling of lipases catalyzed (R,S)-1-phenylethanol resolution

This study was focused on the development of a kinetic model and a reactor model for the enzymatic resolution of (R,S)-1-phenylethanol. The reaction progress curves catalyzed by immobilized lipases, ChiroCLEC-PC in batch stirred tank reactor were used to develop the kinetic model. The resolution followed Ping-Pong Bi-Bi mechanism with the inhibition of lauric acid, (R,S)-1-phenylethanol and water. The validity of the model was verified by fitting it to another experimental data catalyzed by immobilized lipases, Chirazyme L2, c.-f., C3, lyo at the same reaction conditions. The rate equation was then applied for the development of reactor model in a recirculated packed bed reactor system. The overall effectiveness factor and Peclet number were used to determine the mass transfer and axial dispersion limitation in the reactor performance. The reactor model was verified by fitting it to the larger scale reactor data with the correlation coefficient value more than 0.99

Effect of silver based products on simulated body fluid

Silver Zeolite A, Silver clinoptilolite, and Silver bentonite are called Silver Based Products (SBPs) .They have been used for treating some types of infectious diseases as antibacterial agents. Gastric fluid is vital fluids in body.. The first aims of this study is to study the effect of SBPs on the pH changes of gastric fluids in different concentrations, however, studying the effects of simulated gastric fluid (SGF) as model of gastric fluid on the structures of SBPs was the second aim. Zeolites and clay were applied as the carrier materials which silver ion (Ag+) could attach to them and produce SBPs as antibacterial agents. SBPs are analyzed by EDX and FTIR spectroscopy. The effects of SBPs on (SGF) are studied in different concentrations. The chemical framework variations of SBPs are analyzed by FTIR spectroscopy after contact with SGF in different concentrations and the results shown, the most important structural peaks which are same as those parents. SBPs had some insignificant structural variations after contacted with SGF. With increasing concentration of SBPs to SGF, more changes are occurred on their structures. At last the pepsin activity in SGF is studied

The role of language and culture in face and scene processing and description strategies

Face perception is important in a variety of human social interactions, allowing us to keep track of individuals’ identities, recognise emotional expressions and intentions and make judgements about variables such as age, ethnicity and health. While early research assumed that face recognition strategies were universal, more recent studies have shown that East Asian and White Caucasian observers use different looking strategies to recognise faces, with East Asian participants focusing more on the centre of the face, which has been interpreted as representing a configural processing strategy, while White Caucasian observers fixate more on the eyes and mouth, which has been interpreted as representing a more featural processing strategy. Debate continues over the reasons behind this difference, with some researchers arguing that it represents an extension of more holistic cognition in the more collectivist East Asian cultures, and more analytic cognition in individualist Western cultures. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that cognition is bound by language, and there have been studies showing changes in response patterns in tasks conducted by bilingual participants in their different languages. Others argue that these differences in face processing are driven instead by different salient diagnostic features of faces of different ethnicity. In this thesis, I present the results of five studies examining the role of culture and facial appearance in determining the looking strategy of East Asian and White Caucasian observers. In Chapter 2, we attempted to use a Navon task to prime featural or configural processing in Malaysian Chinese observers engaged in a face recognition and description task of East Asian and White Caucasian faces. While the Navon task failed to elicit a change in either looking or description strategy, it was noted that the features fixated on most were not the features described most frequently. Further, the race of the face impacted on the looking strategy used to recognise faces, with participants fixating more on Caucasian hair than Asian hair, suggesting that the different diagnostic features may drive differences in looking strategies. It was also casually observed that observers with stronger Asian accents made more configural descriptions. In Chapter 3, I investigate the strategies used by Malaysian Chinese and White Caucasian observers when recognising and describing East Asian and White Caucasian faces. A linguistic/cultural priming paradigm was used in an attempt to induce featural or configural processing in observers. In Study 1, the East Asian observers’ eye movements were impacted by the race of the faces, making more fixations on Caucasian hair and eyes than on Asian hair and eyes. Again, patterns of looking and description were very different. Also, the description patterns differed by language, with participants making more descriptions of hair when speaking English and more descriptions of noses when speaking Chinese, suggesting that descriptions may be constrained by language. In Study 2, White Austrian Caucasian observers again showed very different description and fixation patterns. Observers again showed different fixation patterns for Asian and Caucasian faces, fixating more on Caucasian hair than Asian hair, suggesting that fixation pattern may be driven by the diagnostic features of the faces. Observers made more descriptions in German than in English, but did not show a difference in the pattern of describing different facial features depending on either the language spoken or the race of face, suggesting that the more similar German and English languages have similar constraints. Asian observers have been previously shown to direct more attention to contextual information in images of scenes than Caucasian observers, possibly due to a more holistic/configural cognitive style. Since it is known that faces are processed in a different way to other stimuli, in Chapter 4, I report the results of two studies investigating the impact of linguistic/cultural priming on participants’ eye movements and descriptions when describing street scenes. The Malaysian Chinese participants made more fixations on, and descriptions of, nonfocal than focal objects in Asian street scenes and when speaking Chinese, but not when describing European scenes in English. The White Austrian Caucasian observers did not show any difference in fixation or description patterns depending on linguistic condition, other than making more descriptions overall in German than in English. This suggests that, in a non-face description task, linguistic/cultural priming was successful in eliciting cultural “frame shifting” in Malaysian Chinese participants speaking English and Chinese, but not in Austrian Caucasian participants speaking the culturally more similar English and German. We conclude that culture/language does impact on description patterns in face and scene stimuli, possibly reflecting the constraints of different languages. Further, an impact of linguistic/cultural priming was found on fixation patterns in street scene stimuli. However, in face perception tasks, race of face, but not cultural/linguistic condition, impacted on fixation patterns. We conclude that, while language and culture may have an impact on cognition, and place constraints on descriptions, the diagnostic features of faces appear to primarily determine the fixation patterns on face stimuli