New application of microbial l-glutaminase as a flavor enhancing agent in beef burgers

L‑glutaminase (L‑glutamine amidohydrolase EC3.5.1.2) is the key enzyme in enhancing the taste and aroma of oriental fermented foods by increasing their glutamic acid content and as a result imparting a palatable taste. Beef burgers were prepared using different levels of the partially purified L- glutaminase (2.0 to10.0 U/100 g) prepared from Aspergillus oryzae NRRL 32567. Beef burgers treated with 6.0 U/100g and the others treated with monosodium glutamate (5000 ppm) were chemically, sensory and microbiologically evaluated and compared to untreated control during frozen storage at –18 ºC for 3 months. Treatment with L‑glutaminase (6 U/100g) resulted in an increase of 443% in glutamic acid and a reduction of 63% in glutamine contents resulting in an enhanced preferable taste and odor of the prepared beef burgers. Burgers treated with 6.0 U/100g exhibited the best odor, texture, taste and overall quality scores when compared to the untreated control and samples treated with monosodium glutamate (5000 ppm). During the frozen storage of all samples, an expected slight, but significant (p≤0.05), increase in the total mesophilic bacterial count was evident and such increase was quite acceptable since numbers did not exceed the limit of 5.7x103 cfu/g. Similarly, the total psychrotrophs did not exceed 3.7x102 cfu/g

Adrenocortical status in infants and children with sepsis and septic shock

AbstractBackgroundThe benefit from corticosteroids remains controversial in sepsis and septic shock and the presence of adrenal insufficiency (AI) has been proposed to justify steroid use.AimTo determine adrenal state and its relation with outcome in critical children admitted with sepsis to PICU of Cairo University, Children Hospital.MethodsThirty cases with sepsis and septic shock were studied. Cortisol levels (CL) were estimated at baseline and after high-dose short ACTH stimulation in those patients and in 30 matched controls. Absolute AI was defined as basal CL<7μg/dl and peak CL<18μg/dl. Relative AI was diagnosed if cortisol increment after stimulation is <9μg/dl.ResultsOverall mortality of cases was 50%. The mean CL at baseline in cases was higher than that of controls (51.39μg/dl vs. 12.83μg/dl, p=0.000). The mean CL 60min after ACTH stimulation was higher than that of controls (73.38μg/dl vs. 32.80μg/dl, p=0.000). The median of %rise in cases was lower than that of controls (45.3% vs. 151.7%). There was a positive correlation between basal and post-stimulation cortisol with number of system failure, inotropic support duration, mechanical ventilation days, and CO2 level in blood. There was a negative correlation between basal and post stimulation cortisol with blood pH and HCO3.ConclusionRAI is common with severe sepsis/septic shock. It is associated with more inotropic support and has higher mortality. Studies are warranted to determine whether corticosteroid therapy has a survival benefit in children with RAI and catecholamine resistant septic shock

Privacy-Preserving Outsourcing of Large-Scale Nonlinear Programming to the Cloud

The increasing massive data generated by various sources has given birth to big data analytics. Solving large-scale nonlinear programming problems (NLPs) is one important big data analytics task that has applications in many domains such as transport and logistics. However, NLPs are usually too computationally expensive for resource-constrained users. Fortunately, cloud computing provides an alternative and economical service for resource-constrained users to outsource their computation tasks to the cloud. However, one major concern with outsourcing NLPs is the leakage of user's private information contained in NLP formulations and results. Although much work has been done on privacy-preserving outsourcing of computation tasks, little attention has been paid to NLPs. In this paper, we for the first time investigate secure outsourcing of general large-scale NLPs with nonlinear constraints. A secure and efficient transformation scheme at the user side is proposed to protect user's private information; at the cloud side, generalized reduced gradient method is applied to effectively solve the transformed large-scale NLPs. The proposed protocol is implemented on a cloud computing testbed. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that significant time can be saved for users and the proposed mechanism has the potential for practical use.Comment: Ang Li and Wei Du equally contributed to this work. This work was done when Wei Du was at the University of Arkansas. 2018 EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm

Passive decoy state quantum key distribution with practical light sources

Decoy states have been proven to be a very useful method for significantly enhancing the performance of quantum key distribution systems with practical light sources. While active modulation of the intensity of the laser pulses is an effective way of preparing decoy states in principle, in practice passive preparation might be desirable in some scenarios. Typical passive schemes involve parametric down-conversion. More recently, it has been shown that phase randomized weak coherent pulses (WCP) can also be used for the same purpose [M. Curty {\it et al.}, Opt. Lett. {\bf 34}, 3238 (2009).] This proposal requires only linear optics together with a simple threshold photon detector, which shows the practical feasibility of the method. Most importantly, the resulting secret key rate is comparable to the one delivered by an active decoy state setup with an infinite number of decoy settings. In this paper we extend these results, now showing specifically the analysis for other practical scenarios with different light sources and photo-detectors. In particular, we consider sources emitting thermal states, phase randomized WCP, and strong coherent light in combination with several types of photo-detectors, like, for instance, threshold photon detectors, photon number resolving detectors, and classical photo-detectors. Our analysis includes as well the effect that detection inefficiencies and noise in the form of dark counts shown by current threshold detectors might have on the final secret ket rate. Moreover, we provide estimations on the effects that statistical fluctuations due to a finite data size can have in practical implementations.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure

GPU-based ultra-fast direct aperture optimization for online adaptive radiation therapy

Online adaptive radiation therapy (ART) has great promise to significantly reduce normal tissue toxicity and/or improve tumor control through real-time treatment adaptations based on the current patient anatomy. However, the major technical obstacle for clinical realization of online ART, namely the inability to achieve real-time efficiency in treatment re-planning, has yet to be solved. To overcome this challenge, this paper presents our work on the implementation of an intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) direct aperture optimization (DAO) algorithm on graphics processing unit (GPU) based on our previous work on CPU. We formulate the DAO problem as a large-scale convex programming problem, and use an exact method called column generation approach to deal with its extremely large dimensionality on GPU. Five 9-field prostate and five 5-field head-and-neck IMRT clinical cases with 5\times5 mm2 beamlet size and 2.5\times2.5\times2.5 mm3 voxel size were used to evaluate our algorithm on GPU. It takes only 0.7~2.5 seconds for our implementation to generate optimal treatment plans using 50 MLC apertures on an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU card. Our work has therefore solved a major problem in developing ultra-fast (re-)planning technologies for online ART

Implementation of two-party protocols in the noisy-storage model

The noisy-storage model allows the implementation of secure two-party protocols under the sole assumption that no large-scale reliable quantum storage is available to the cheating party. No quantum storage is thereby required for the honest parties. Examples of such protocols include bit commitment, oblivious transfer and secure identification. Here, we provide a guideline for the practical implementation of such protocols. In particular, we analyze security in a practical setting where the honest parties themselves are unable to perform perfect operations and need to deal with practical problems such as errors during transmission and detector inefficiencies. We provide explicit security parameters for two different experimental setups using weak coherent, and parametric down conversion sources. In addition, we analyze a modification of the protocols based on decoy states.Comment: 41 pages, 33 figures, this is a companion paper to arXiv:0906.1030 considering practical aspects, v2: published version, title changed in accordance with PRA guideline

Lack of association of CTLA-4 +49 A/G polymorphism with predisposition to type 1 diabetes in a cohort of Egyptian families

Background: Type 1 diabetes is one of the most common chronic childhood illnesses. Interplay between genetic susceptibility and environmental factors is thought to provide the fundamental element for the disease. Apart from the Major Histocompatibility locus which is the main contributor to risk susceptibility, more than 40 loci are recognized. One among these is the CTLA-4, however data from the literature are controversial. The aim of our study was to investigate the role of CTLA4 49 A/G as a risk susceptibility factor for the development of type 1 diabetes in a cohort of Egyptian families.Subjects and methods: This is a case control study including 88 Egyptian families with one or more index cases (&lt;18 years). The control group comprised 369 healthy unrelated subjects with no family history of diabetes or autoimmune disease. Using PCR-RFLP methodology, CTLA4 49 A/G was analyzed in 738 samples representing 88 families (88 patients, 125 siblings and 156 parents) and 369 control.Results: The age of onset was 6 days-12.5 years with a mean of 5.3± 3.6 and a median of 5 years. The mode of presentation was classic symptoms in 51 and diabetic ketoacidosis in 37 cases. Twenty-two cases had a history of viral infection or exanthematous disease and four had associated autoimmune diseases. No significant differences were encountered between the different groups with regard to CTLA4 +49 A/G genotype or allele frequencies. Neither was there a relation between the various genotypes and age of onset or the mode of presentation.Conclusions: CTLA4 49 A/G polymorphism was not recognized as a risk susceptibility factor in our cohort. This may be attributed to the low co-incidence of autoimmune diseases. Up to our best knowledge, this is the first study involving families. We recommend that all studies performed on risk susceptibility to type 1 diabetes should include proper investigation for other autoimmune diseases to exclude their confounding effect on data analysis.Keywords: Type 1 diabetes; CTLA-4; Risk susceptibilit

Optimal Fleet Composition via Dynamic Programming and Golden Section Search

In this paper, we consider an optimization problem arising in vehicle fleet management. The problem is to construct a heterogeneous vehicle fleet in such a way that cost is minimized subject to a constraint on the overall fleet size. The cost function incorporates fixed and variable costs associated with the fleet, as well as hiring costs that are incurred when vehicle requirements exceed fleet capacity. We first consider the simple case when there is only one type of vehicle. We show that in this case the cost function is convex, and thus the problem can be solved efficiently using the well-known golden section method. We then devise an algorithm, based on dynamic programming and the golden section method, for solving the general problem in which there are multiple vehicle types. We conclude the paper with some simulation results