A review of postharvest approaches to reduce fungal and mycotoxin contamination of foods

Contamination of agricultural and food products by some fungi species that produce mycotoxins can result in unsafe food and feed. Mycotoxins have been demonstrated to have disease-causing activities, including carcinogenicity, immune toxicity, teratogenicity, neurotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, and hepatotoxicity. Most of mycotoxins are heat stable and cannot be easily destroyed by conventional thermal food processing or domestic cooking methods. Postharvest approaches to prevent growth of mycotoxin-producing fungi and detoxify mycotoxins from contaminated food are important topics in food safety research. Physical, chemical, and biological methods have been applied to prevent fungal growth or mycotoxin production, or to reduce mycotoxin content in the postharvest period and contribute toward mitigating against the effects of mycotoxins on human health. This literature review aims to evaluate postharvest approaches that have been applied to control both fungi growth and mycotoxin content in food and discuss their potential for upscaling to industrial scale

Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

Water-Soluble Flexible Organic Frameworks That Include and Deliver Proteins.

Four water-soluble hydrazone-based three-dimensional (3D) flexible organic frameworks FOF-1-4 have been synthesized from a semirigid tetracationic tetraaldehyde and four flexible dihydrazides. 1H NMR spectroscopy indicated the quantitative formation of FOF-1-4 in D2O, while dynamic light scattering experiments revealed that, depending on the concentration, these porous frameworks display hydrodynamic diameters ranging from 50 to 120 nm. The porosity of the frameworks is confirmed by ethanol vapor adsorption experiments of the solid samples as well as the high loading capacity for a 2.3 nm porphyrin guest in water. The new water-soluble frameworks exhibit low cytotoxicity and form inherent pores with diameters of 5.3 or 6.7 nm, allowing rapid inclusion of proteins such as bovine serum albumin and green and orange fluorescent proteins, and efficient delivery of the proteins into normal and cancer cells. Flow cytometric analysis reveals percentages of the delivered cells up to 99.8%