In-vitro experiment of Listeria reduction in ready-to-eat dry cured sausages

The risk of listeriosis associated with ready-to-eat foods is a major concern in United States. The recently published United States regulations require ready-to-eat meat producers to control Listeria monocytogenes, using interventions which may include antimicrobials that reduce post-processing contamination by at least 1 log cycle and that no more than 1 log increase throughout product shelf life. This regulation impact also the Spanish meat producers especially dry cured sausages, which export their products to USA. In this study, we analyzed in vitro, individually and in combinations, the commonly applied antimicrobials to reduce Listeria. Performing in-vitro experiment before applying directly on dry cured sausages offer us the benefits such as time and cost saving

Recent progress in biohydrometallurgy and microbial characterisation

Since the discovery of microbiological metal dissolution, numerous biohydrometallurgical approaches have been developed to use microbially assisted aqueous extractive metallurgy for the recovery of metals from ores, concentrates, and recycled or residual materials. Biohydrometallurgy has helped to alleviate the challenges related to continually declining ore grades by transforming uneconomic ore resources to reserves. Engineering techniques used for biohydrometallurgy span from above ground reactor, vat, pond, heap and dump leaching to underground in situ leaching. Traditionally biohydrometallurgy has been applied to the bioleaching of base metals and uranium from sulfides and biooxidation of sulfidic refractory gold ores and concentrates before cyanidation. More recently the interest in using bioleaching for oxide ore and waste processing, as well as extracting other commodities such as rare earth elements has been growing. Bioprospecting, adaptation, engineering and storing of microorganisms has increased the availability of suitable biocatalysts for biohydrometallurgical applications. Moreover, the advancement of microbial characterisation methods has increased the understanding of microbial communities and their capabilities in the processes. This paper reviews recent progress in biohydrometallurgy and microbial characterisatio

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

In-vitro experiment of Listeria reduction in ready-to-eat dry cured sausages

The risk of listeriosis associated with ready-to-eat foods is a major concern in United States. The recently published United States regulations require ready-to-eat meat producers to control Listeria monocytogenes, using interventions which may include antimicrobials that reduce post-processing contamination by at least 1 log cycle and that no more than 1 log increase throughout product shelf life. This regulation impact also the Spanish meat producers especially dry cured sausages, which export their products to USA. In this study, we analyzed in vitro, individually and in combinations, the commonly applied antimicrobials to reduce Listeria. Performing in-vitro experiment before applying directly on dry cured sausages offer us the benefits such as time and cost saving.</p

A comparison of surface and underground array measurements of ambient noise recorded in Naples (Italy).

Abstract In this study, we describe two experiments of seismic noise measurements carried out in Naples, Italy. The site allowed measurements to be obtained both at the surface and in a tunnel that is 120-m-deep. The main goal was to compare the seismic response evaluated at the surface to the in-tunnel response, through spectral, polarization, and resonance directivity analyses. In the 1 to 20 Hz frequency band, the noise level was up to 15 dB higher at the surface than in the tunnel. The polarization properties and horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratios appear not to be influenced by the tunnel geometry or by the topography. Some preferential alignments were observed in the polarization azimuths computed at the surface, which are likely to be due to local sources, rather than morphological features. The absence of directivity effects and the low noise levels in the tunnel make this site suitable for installing seismic stations. We also studied how the subsoil structure affects the seismic motion at the surface. The dispersive properties of the Rayleigh waves were investigated using the spatial autocorrelation method. A joint inversion of the dispersion data and the horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratios provided the subsurface Vs profile. The derived model has a low velocity contrast at depth, such as to generate moderate and broad H/V spectral ratio peak amplitude. The normalized spectral ratio appears more appropriate to identify the soil-resonance frequencies

An efficient method for mutant library creation in Pichia pastoris useful in directed evolution

The yeast Pichia pastoris is being increasingly used as a host for expressing enzymes on a large scale, but application in directed evolution requiring efficient expression of libraries of mutants is hampered due to the time-consuming multistep procedure which includes an intermediate bacterial host (Escherichia coli). Here we introduce a fast and highly simplified method to produce gene libraries in P. pastoris expression vectors. For the purpose of illustration, Galactomyces geotrichum lipase 1 (GGL1) was used as the catalyst in the enantioselective hydrolytic kinetic resolution of 2-methyldecanoic acid p-nitrophenyl ester, the gene mutagenesis method being saturation mutagenesis. The phosphorylated linear plasmid which is integrated in the yeast genome was obtained by combination of partially overlapped fragments using overlap-extension PCR. An intermediate bacterial host is not necessary, neither are restriction enzymes. This method is also applicable when using error-prone PCR for library creation in directed evolution.282122129Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [1170]Funda ao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao PauloDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [1170