The Effects of Different Solvents on Phenolic, Flavonoid, Anthocyanin Contents and Free Radical Scavenging Activity on Pomegranate Juice and Seeds

Our phytochemical investigation defined the polyphenol, anthocyanin and flavonoid content from methanolic, ethanolic 50% and watery extracts from fresh pomegranate juice and seeds with a spectrophotometric method. The antioxidant capacity was defined with the ABTS and DPPH methods. We determined the polyphenols with the Folin-Ciocalteu method, the anthocyanins with the method in Hungarian Pharmacopoeia VIIIth edition at Myrtilli fructus monography and the flavonoids with a modified method of the Romanian Pharmacopeia Xth edition Cynarae folium monography. We expressed the concentration of polyphenols in gallic acids (GA). The values indicated the following: in fruit juice, 47.57 μg GA/ml, in methanol seed extract 7 μg GA/g, the ethanol 50% and in watery seed extracts 8 μg GA/g. The definition of flavonoids indicated the following values expressed in quercetin (QE): in fruit juice 706 μg QE/ml, in methanol seed extract 416 μg QE/g, in ethanol 50% seed extract 46 μg QE/g and in watery seed extract 57 μg QE/g. The anthocyans from juice 3.95 mg/100 ml and seed 6.47 mg/100 g expressed in cyanidin-3-0-glycoside. We determined the following values with the ABTS method: the antioxidant capacity of juice is 25.40 μg/ml, in methanol seed extract 2.87 μg/ml, in ethanol seed extract 2.52 μg/ml, in watery 9.15 μg/ml. With the DPPH method, we obtained the following values: from juice 54.2 μg/ml, from methanolic extract 14.7 μg/ml, from ethanolic extract 10.58 μg/ml and watery extract 18.22 μg/ml. The received data shows the importance of pomegranate, which can be a new phytotherapeutic potential resource

Identification of potential mycotoxin producing fungi on agricultural products in Hungary and Serbia

One of the most important effects of climate change is the occurrence of thermotolerant mycotoxin producing fungi in countries with temperate climate, causing mycotoxin contamination of agricultural products. Indeed, a shift has recently been observed in the occurrence of aflatoxin producing fungi in Europe, with consequent aflatoxin contamination in agricultural commodities including maize and milk in several European countries including Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania and Ukraine. These observations led us to examine the occurrence of mycotoxin producing Aspergilli in agricultural products in Hungary and Serbia. The samples were collected from cereal fields in Hungary and North-Serbia (Vojvodina) after harvest in 2012. Surface-sterilized cereal seeds were placed on selective media and the isolated fungal strains were identified using morphological methods. The species identification of selected isolates was carried out using sequence-based methods. Several potentially aflatoxigenic A. flavus isolates were identified on maize. Further examinations of mycotoxin producing abilities of the isolates, and their occurrence in milk and milk-derived products are in progress

ParkinsoNET: Estimation of UPDRS Score using Hubness-aware Feed-Forward Neural Networks

Parkinson’s disease is a worldwide frequent neurodegenerative disorder with increasing incidence. Speech disturbance appears during the progression of the disease. UPDRS is a gold standard tool for diagnostic and follow up of the disease. We aim at estimating the UPDRS score based on biomedical voice recordings. In this paper, we study the hubness phenomenon in context of the UPDRS score estimation and propose hubness-aware error correction for feed-forward neural networks in order to increase the accuracy of estimation. We perform experiments on publicly available datasets derived form real voice data and show that the proposed technique systematically increases the accuracy of various feed-forward neural networks

A new ParlaMint corpus for Hungarian 30m tokens of annotated parliamentary data

Parliamentary data constitute a rich source for research for academic fields in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). To facilitate such research, comparable, high-quality parliamentary corpora are needed. The ParlaMint project, funded by CLARIN-ERIC, aims to create such corpora for languages spoken in European parliaments in a shared framework consisting of uniform encoding schemas, metadata structure, and Universal Dependencies-type linguistic annotation. The newly built Hungarian corpus of ParlaMint II focuses on the minutes of the Hungarian National Assembly between May 2014 and June 2022 and can be considered a major improvement from the Hungarian corpus of ParlaMint I. It has a wider time frame, more extensive metadata on speakers and their affiliations, and more sophisticated linguistic analysis than what was available in ParlaMint I. The Hungarian ParlaMint II corpus is openly available, just as all the ParlaMint corpora for other languages. Some potential applications of ParlaMint corpora in SSH research are also discussed

Conjugation with Tris Decreases the Risk of Ketoprofen-Induced Mucosal Damage and Reduces Inflammation-Associated Methane Production in a Rat Model of Colitis

We have designed a new compound from the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) ketoprofen (Ket) and 2-amino-2-(hydroxymethyl)-1,3-propanediol (Tris) precursors, with the aim to reduce the gastrointestinal (GI) side effects of NSAID therapies. We investigated mucosal reactions in a standard rat model of colitis together with methane generation as a possible indicator of pro-inflammatory activation under this condition (approval number: V./148/2013). Whole-body methane production (photoacoustic spectroscopy) and serosal microcirculation (intravital videomicroscopy) were measured, and mucosal damage was assessed (conventional histology; in vivo laser-scanning endomicroscopy). Inflammatory markers were measured from tissue and blood samples. Colitis induced an inflammatory response, morphological colonic damage and increased methane output. Ket treatment lowered inflammatory activation and colonic mucosal injury, but macroscopic gastric bleeding and increased methane output were present. Ket-Tris reduced inflammatory activation, methane emission and colonic mucosal damage, without inducing gastric injury. Conjugation with Tris reduces the GI side effects of Ket and still decreases the inflammatory response in experimental colitis. Methane output correlates with the mucosal inflammatory response and non-invasively demonstrates the effects of anti-inflammatory treatments