Development of antioxidant dietary fibers from wine grape pomace and their applications as functional food ingredients

Wine grape pomace (WGP), the byproduct from winemaking, is a good source of polyphenols and dietary fibers, and may be utilized as antioxidant dietary fibers (ADF) for food applications. The objectives of this thesis research were to first determine the phenolic compounds, antioxidant and antimicrobial activities in red WGP under different drying processes for long-term storage, and to further evaluate the feasibility of using WGP as a functional food ingredient in yogurt and salad dressing for enhancing the nutritional value and improving storability of the products. Two types of WGP samples, pomace containing seeds and skins (P) and pomace with skins only (S) from Pinot Noir (PN) and Merlot (M) were studied. Samples were subjected to four different drying conditions: 40 °C conventional and vacuum oven, 25 °C ambient air and freeze dry. Total phenolic content (TPC, by Folin-Ciocalteu assay), anthocyanins (ACY, by pH differential method) and flavanols content (TFC, by vanillin assay) of the samples along with their antioxidant activity (DPPH radical scavenge method, RSA) and antibacterial activity (minimum inhibition concentration, MIC) were determined during 16 weeks of storage under vacuum condition at 15±2 °C. Meanwhile, dietary fiber profile was evaluated by using gravimetric-enzyme method. Results showed that dietary fiber contents of PN-P, PN-S, M-P and M-S were 57-63% d.m. with the majority of insoluble fraction. Freeze dried WGP retained the highest bioactive compounds with TPC 21.19-67.74 mg GAE/g d.m., ACY of 0.35-0.76 mg Mal-3-glu/g d.m., TFC of 30.16-106.61 mg CE/g d.m. and RSA of 22.01-37.46 mg AAE/g d.m., followed with ambient air dried samples. Overall, TPC, TFC and RSA were higher in PN than in M, and higher in pomace than in skins, while reverse results were observed in ACY. All samples lost significant amount of bioactive compounds during storage, in which ambient air and freeze dried samples had TPC reduction of 32-56% and 35-58%, respectively at the end of 16 weeks of storage. RSA in PN-P and M-P remained more than 50 mg TE/g d.m., meaning WGP still met the criteria of ADF definition after 16 weeks of storage. WGP extracts showed higher antibacterial efficiency against L. innocua than that of E. coli with MIC of 2, 7, 3 and 8% against L. innocua, and 3, 6, 4 and 9% against E. coli for PN-P, PN-S, M-P and M-S samples, respectively. This study demonstrated that Pinot Noir and Merlot pomace are good sources of ADF even after 16 weeks of storage at 15 °C and vacuum condition. Due to the highest antioxidant activity (RSA 37.46 mg AAE/g) and dietary fiber content (61%), PN-P was selected as ADF to be fortified in yogurt and salad dressing. Three types of WGP: whole powder (WP), liquid extract (LE) and freeze dried extract (FDE) with different concentrations were incorporated into yogurt (Y), Italian (I) and Thousand Island (T) salad dressings. TPC, RSA and dietary fiber content, major quality attributes including pH and peroxide value (PV) during the shelf life and consumer acceptance of fortified products were evaluated. The highest ADF were obtained in 3% WP-Y, 1% WP-I and 2% WP-T samples with the dietary fiber contents of 1.98%, 2.12% and 1.83% and RSA of 935.78, 585.60 and 706.67 mg AAE/kg, respectively. WP fortified products had more dietary fiber content than that of LE and FDE fortified ones because of the insoluble fractions. The pH dropped from 4.52 to 4.32 for 3% WP-Y during three weeks of storage at 4 °C, but remained stable in WGP-I and WGP-T samples after four weeks of storage at 4 °C. Adding WGP resulted in 35-65% reduction of PV in all samples compared to the control. In WGP-Y, the viscosity increased, but syneresis and lactic acid percentage were stable during storage. The 1%WP-Y, 0.5%WP-I and 1%WP-T samples were mostly liked by consumers. Study demonstrated that WGP can be used as a functional food ingredient for enhancing nutraceutical content and extending shelf-life of the food products. This study provided important information about the economically feasible drying methods for retaining the bioactive compounds in WGP during processing and storage and also suggested that WGP can be utilized as antioxidant dietary fiber to be fortified in consumer products to promote nutritional benefit and extend product shelf-life

Ethnic minority women’s experiences of accessing antenatal care in high income European countries: a systematic review

Background: Women from ethnic minority backgrounds are at greater risk of adverse maternal outcomes. Antenatal care plays a crucial role in reducing risks of poor outcomes. The aim of this study was to identify, appraise, and synthesise the recent qualitative evidence on ethnic minority women’s experiences of accessing antenatal care in high-income European countries, and to develop a novel conceptual framework for access based on women’s perspectives. Methods: We conducted a comprehensive search of seven electronic databases in addition to manual searches to identify all qualitative studies published between January 2010 and May 2021. Identified articles were screened in two stages against the inclusion criteria with titles and abstracts screened first followed by full-text screening. Included studies were quality appraised using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklist and extracted data were synthesised using a ‘best fit’ framework, based on an existing theoretical model of health care access. Results: A total of 30 studies were included in this review. Women’s experiences covered two overarching themes: ‘provision of antenatal care’ and ‘women's uptake of antenatal care’. The ‘provision of antenatal care’ theme included five sub-themes: promotion of antenatal care importance, making contact and getting to antenatal care, costs of antenatal care, interactions with antenatal care providers and models of antenatal care provision. The ‘women's uptake of antenatal care’ theme included seven sub-themes: delaying initiation of antenatal care, seeking antenatal care, help from others in accessing antenatal care, engaging with antenatal care, previous experiences of interacting with maternity services, ability to communicate, and immigration status. A novel conceptual model was developed from these themes. Conclusion: The findings demonstrated the multifaceted and cyclical nature of initial and ongoing access to antenatal care for ethnic minority women. Structural and organisational factors played a significant role in women’s ability to access antenatal care. Participants in majority of the included studies were women newly arrived in the host country, highlighting the need for research to be conducted across different generations of ethnic minority women taking into account the duration of stay in the host country where they accessed antenatal care

Development, acceptability and feasibility of a community-based intervention to increase timely initiation of antenatal care in an area of high ethnic diversity and low socio-economic status in the UK

BACKGROUND: Antenatal care plays an important role in preventing adverse maternal and new-born outcomes. Women from ethnic minority backgrounds and of low socio-economic status are at greater risk of initiating antenatal care later than the recommended 10 weeks. There is a paucity of research exploring the development and evaluation of community-based interventions to increase the timely initiation of antenatal care. OBJECTIVE: To develop and evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of a co-produced community-based intervention to increase uptake of antenatal care in an area with high ethnic diversity and low socio-economic status. DESIGN: The intervention was developed using co-production workshops and conversations with 20 local service users and 14 stakeholders, underpinned by the theory of Diffusion of Innovation. The intervention was evaluated, on the domains of acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, and feasibility. Questionnaires (n=36), interviews (n=10), and focus groups (n=13) were conducted among those who received the intervention. Observations (n=13) of intervention sessions were conducted to assess intervention fidelity. Quantitative and qualitative data were analysed using SPSS and NVivo software respectively. RESULTS: Over 91% of respondents positively ranked the intervention. Qualitative findings with respect to ‘acceptability’ included four subthemes: how the intervention was communicated, the characteristics of the person delivering the intervention and their knowledge, and the reassurance offered by the intervention. The ‘adoption’ theme included three sub-themes: being informed helps women to engage with antenatal care, the intervention provides information for future use, and onwards conveyance of the intervention information. The ‘appropriateness’ theme included three sub-themes: existing gap in information, nature of information given as part of the intervention, and talking about pregnancy in public. The ‘feasibility’ theme included two sub-themes: value of delivering the intervention in areas of high footfall and relational aspect of receiving the intervention. Observations showed intervention fidelity of 100%. CONCLUSION: The community-based intervention, coproduced with women and maternity care stakeholders, was positively evaluated, and offered an innovative and promising approach to engage and educate women about the timely initiation of antenatal care in an ethnically diverse and socio-economically deprived community

Wine Grape Pomace as Antioxidant Dietary Fiber for Enhancing Nutritional Value and Improving Storability of Yogurt and Salad Dressing

Wine grape pomace (WGP) as a source of antioxidant dietary fiber (ADF) was fortified in yogurt (Y), Italian (I) and Thousand Island (T) salad dressings. During the three weeks of storage at 4 °C, viscosity and pH of WGP-Y increased and decreased, respectively, but syneresis and lactic acid percentage of WGP-Y and pH of WGP-I and WGP-T were stable. Adding WGP resulted in 35-65% reduction of peroxide values in all samples. Dried whole pomace powder (WP) fortified products had dietary fiber content of 0.94-3.6% (w/w product), mainly insoluble fractions. Total phenolic content and DPPH radical scavenging activity were 958-1340 mg GAE/kg product and 710-936 mg AAE/kg product, respectively. The highest ADF were obtained in 3%WP-Y, 1%WP-I and 2%WP-T, while 1%WP-Y, 0.5%WP-I and 1%WP-T were mostly liked by consumers based on the sensory study. Study demonstrated that WGP may be used as a functional food ingredient for promoting human health and extending shelf-life of food products.Keywords: yogurt, antioxidant dietary fiber, wine grape pomace, salad dressing, storabilityKeywords: yogurt, antioxidant dietary fiber, wine grape pomace, salad dressing, storabilit

How Does the Cell Overcome LCP Nanoparticle-Induced Calcium Toxicity?

To address the question of how cells respond to the possible Ca2+ toxicity caused by the release of Ca2+ into the cytoplasm by LCP nanoparticles, a series of in vitro and in vivo studies using Ca2+ pump inhibitors were conducted. The results indicated that two major Ca2+ pumps on the plasma membrane and the mitochondrial membrane, respectively, were able to rapidly respond to the elevated cytosolic Ca2+ concentration and prevent Ca2+-induced apoptosis or necrosis. However, exposure to specific inhibitors of calcium pumps would cause LCP-treated H460 cells to undergo necrosis both in vitro and in vivo. These results demonstrated that the Ca2+ delivered by LCP was not toxic to cells when the cells contain functional Ca2+ pumps

Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis in Multimodal Context

Multimodal corpora have become an essential language resource for language science and grounded natural language processing (NLP) systems due to the growing need to understand and interpret human communication across various channels. In this paper, we first present our efforts in building the first Multimodal Corpus for Languages in Taiwan (MultiMoco). Based on the corpus, we conduct a case study investigating the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (LRH), specifically examining whether the hand gestures co-occurring with speech constants facilitate lexical retrieval or serve other discourse functions. With detailed annotations on eight parliamentary interpellations in Taiwan Mandarin, we explore the co-occurrence between speech constants and non-verbal features (i.e., head movement, face movement, hand gesture, and function of hand gesture). Our findings suggest that while hand gestures do serve as facilitators for lexical retrieval in some cases, they also serve the purpose of information emphasis. This study highlights the potential of the MultiMoco Corpus to provide an important resource for in-depth analysis and further research in multimodal communication studies

Exploring Affordance and Situated Meaning in Image Captions: A Multimodal Analysis

This paper explores the grounding issue regarding multimodal semantic representation from a computational cognitive-linguistic view. We annotate images from the Flickr30k dataset with five perceptual properties: Affordance, Perceptual Salience, Object Number, Gaze Cueing, and Ecological Niche Association (ENA), and examine their association with textual elements in the image captions. Our findings reveal that images with Gibsonian affordance show a higher frequency of captions containing 'holding-verbs' and 'container-nouns' compared to images displaying telic affordance. Perceptual Salience, Object Number, and ENA are also associated with the choice of linguistic expressions. Our study demonstrates that comprehensive understanding of objects or events requires cognitive attention, semantic nuances in language, and integration across multiple modalities. We highlight the vital importance of situated meaning and affordance grounding in natural language understanding, with the potential to advance human-like interpretation in various scenarios.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Development, acceptability and feasibility of a community-based intervention to increase timely initiation of antenatal care in an area of high ethnic diversity and low socio-economic status in the UK

BACKGROUND: Antenatal care plays an important role in preventing adverse maternal and new-born outcomes. Women from ethnic minority backgrounds and of low socio-economic status are at greater risk of initiating antenatal care later than the recommended 10 weeks. There is a paucity of research exploring the development and evaluation of community-based interventions to increase the timely initiation of antenatal care. OBJECTIVE: To develop and evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of a co-produced community-based intervention to increase uptake of antenatal care in an area with high ethnic diversity and low socio-economic status. DESIGN: The intervention was developed using co-production workshops and conversations with 20 local service users and 14 stakeholders, underpinned by the theory of Diffusion of Innovation. The intervention was evaluated, on the domains of acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, and feasibility. Questionnaires (n=36), interviews (n=10), and focus groups (n=13) were conducted among those who received the intervention. Observations (n=13) of intervention sessions were conducted to assess intervention fidelity. Quantitative and qualitative data were analysed using SPSS and NVivo software respectively. RESULTS: Over 91% of respondents positively ranked the intervention. Qualitative findings with respect to ‘acceptability’ included four subthemes: how the intervention was communicated, the characteristics of the person delivering the intervention and their knowledge, and the reassurance offered by the intervention. The ‘adoption’ theme included three sub-themes: being informed helps women to engage with antenatal care, the intervention provides information for future use, and onwards conveyance of the intervention information. The ‘appropriateness’ theme included three sub-themes: existing gap in information, nature of information given as part of the intervention, and talking about pregnancy in public. The ‘feasibility’ theme included two sub-themes: value of delivering the intervention in areas of high footfall and relational aspect of receiving the intervention. Observations showed intervention fidelity of 100%. CONCLUSION: The community-based intervention, coproduced with women and maternity care stakeholders, was positively evaluated, and offered an innovative and promising approach to engage and educate women about the timely initiation of antenatal care in an ethnically diverse and socio-economically deprived community

Disparities in the timing of antenatal care initiation and associated factors in an ethnically dense maternal cohort with high levels of area deprivation.

BACKGROUND: Late access to antenatal care is a contributor to excess mortality and morbidity among ethnic minority mothers compared to White British in the UK. While individual ethnicity and socioeconomic disadvantage are linked to late antenatal care initiation, studies have seldom explored patterns of late initiation and associated factors in ethnically dense socially disadvantaged settings. This study investigated disparities in the timing of antenatal care initiation, and associated factors in an ethnically dense socially disadvantaged maternal cohort. METHODS: A retrospective cross-sectional study using routinely collected anonymous data on all births between April 2007-March 2016 in Luton and Dunstable hospital, UK (N = 46,307). Late initiation was defined as first antenatal appointment attended at > 12 weeks of gestation and further classified into moderately late (13-19 weeks) and extremely late initiation (≥ 20 weeks). We applied logistic and multinomial models to examine associations of late initiation with maternal and sociodemographic factors. RESULTS: Overall, one fifth of mothers (20.8%) started antenatal care at > 12 weeks of gestation. Prevalence of late initiation varied across ethnic groups, from 16.3% (White British) to 34.2% (Black African). Late initiation was strongly associated with non-White British ethnicity. Compared to White British mothers, the odds of late initiation and relative risk of extremely late initiation were highest for Black African mothers [adjusted OR = 3.37 (3.05, 3.73) for late initiation and RRR = 4.03 (3.51, 4.64) for extremely late initiation]. The odds did not increase with increasing area deprivation, but the relative risk of moderately late initiation increased in the most deprived ([RRR = 1.53 (1.37, 1.72)] and second most deprived areas [RRR = 1.23 (1.10, 1.38)]. Late initiation was associated with younger mothers and to a lesser extent, older mothers aged > 35 years. Mothers who smoked during pregnancy were at higher odds of late initiation compared to mothers who did not smoke. CONCLUSIONS: There is a need to intensify universal and targeted programmes/services to support mothers in ethnically dense socially disadvantaged areas to start antenatal care on time. Local variations in ethnic diversity and levels of social disadvantage are essential aspects to consider while planning services and programmes to ensure equity in maternity care provision

A spheroid toxicity assay using magnetic 3D bioprinting and real-time mobile device-based imaging

An ongoing challenge in biomedical research is the search for simple, yet robust assays using 3D cell cultures for toxicity screening. This study addresses that challenge with a novel spheroid assay, wherein spheroids, formed by magnetic 3D bioprinting, contract immediately as cells rearrange and compact the spheroid in relation to viability and cytoskeletal organization. Thus, spheroid size can be used as a simple metric for toxicity. The goal of this study was to validate spheroid contraction as a cytotoxic endpoint using 3T3 fibroblasts in response to 5 toxic compounds (all-trans retinoic acid, dexamethasone, doxorubicin, 5′-fluorouracil, forskolin), sodium dodecyl sulfate (+control), and penicillin-G (−control). Real-time imaging was performed with a mobile device to increase throughput and efficiency. All compounds but penicillin-G significantly slowed contraction in a dose-dependent manner (Z’ = 0.88). Cells in 3D were more resistant to toxicity than cells in 2D, whose toxicity was measured by the MTT assay. Fluorescent staining and gene expression profiling of spheroids confirmed these findings. The results of this study validate spheroid contraction within this assay as an easy, biologically relevant endpoint for high-throughput compound screening in representative 3D environments