Improved antimicrobial activity of nisin-incorporated polymer films by formulation change and addition of food grade chelator

Aims: The following polymers were developed: polyethylene (PE), a PE and polyethylene oxide (70% PE and 30% PEO; PE + PEO) blend, PE and nisin (PE + nisin), PE, nisin, and EDTA (PE + nisin + EDTA), and PE + PEO with nisin (PE + PEO + nisin). Methods and Results: Of the polymers tested, PE and PE + PEO did not exhibit any antimicrobial activity against Brochothrix thermosphacta (BT); however, PE + nisin, PE + nisin + EDTA, and PE + PEO + nisin did. Beef surfaces were experimentally inoculated with 3·50 log10 cfu/cm2 of BT, vacuum packaged with each of the five polymers, and held at 4°C for 21 d. After 3 d at 4°C, BT was reduced \u3e 1·70 log10 by PE + nisin and \u3e 3·50 log10 with PE + nisin + EDTA or PE + PEO + nisin. By 21 d at 4°C, BT was reduced to 0·30 log10 cfu/cm2 when treated with PE + PEO + nisin. Conclusions: It appears that PE + PEO + nisin or PE + nisin + EDTA were more effective for reducing BT, as compared to polymers composed of PE + nisin. Significance and Impact of the Study: Nisin-incorporated polymers may control the growth of undesirable bacteria, thereby extending the shelf life and possibly enhancing the microbial safety of meats

Improved antimicrobial activity of nisin-incorporated polymer films by formulation change and addition of food grade chelator

Aims: The following polymers were developed: polyethylene (PE), a PE and polyethylene oxide (70% PE and 30% PEO; PE + PEO) blend, PE and nisin (PE + nisin), PE, nisin, and EDTA (PE + nisin + EDTA), and PE + PEO with nisin (PE + PEO + nisin). Methods and Results: Of the polymers tested, PE and PE + PEO did not exhibit any antimicrobial activity against Brochothrix thermosphacta (BT); however, PE + nisin, PE + nisin + EDTA, and PE + PEO + nisin did. Beef surfaces were experimentally inoculated with 3·50 log10 cfu/cm2 of BT, vacuum packaged with each of the five polymers, and held at 4°C for 21 d. After 3 d at 4°C, BT was reduced \u3e 1·70 log10 by PE + nisin and \u3e 3·50 log10 with PE + nisin + EDTA or PE + PEO + nisin. By 21 d at 4°C, BT was reduced to 0·30 log10 cfu/cm2 when treated with PE + PEO + nisin. Conclusions: It appears that PE + PEO + nisin or PE + nisin + EDTA were more effective for reducing BT, as compared to polymers composed of PE + nisin. Significance and Impact of the Study: Nisin-incorporated polymers may control the growth of undesirable bacteria, thereby extending the shelf life and possibly enhancing the microbial safety of meats

Extracellular vesicle microRNAs contribute to the osteogenic inhibition of mesenchymal stem cells in multiple myeloma

Osteolytic bone disease is the major complication associated with the progression of multiple myeloma (MM). Recently, extracellular vesicles (EVs) have emerged as mediators of MM-associated bone disease by inhibiting the osteogenic differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs). Here, we investigated a correlation between the EV-mediated osteogenic inhibition and MM vesicle content, focusing on miRNAs. By the use of a MicroRNA Card, we identified a pool of miRNAs, highly expressed in EVs, from MM cell line (MM1.S EVs), expression of which was confirmed in EVs from bone marrow (BM) plasma of patients affected by smoldering myeloma (SMM) and MM. Notably,we found that miR-129-5p, which targets different osteoblast (OBs) differentiation markers, is enriched in MM-EVs compared to SMM-EVs, thus suggesting a selective packaging correlated with pathological grade. We found that miR-129-5p can be transported to hMSCs by MM-EVs and, by the use of miRNA mimics, we investigated its role in recipient cells. Our data demonstrated that the increase of miR-129-5p levels in hMSCs under osteoblastic differentiation stimuli inhibited the expression of the transcription factor Sp1, previously described as a positive modulator of osteoblastic differentiation, and of its target the Alkaline phosphatase (ALPL), thus identifying miR-129-5p among the players of vesicle-mediated bone disease

Efficient compliance checking of RDF data

Automated compliance checking, i.e. the task of automatically assessing whether states of affairs comply with normative systems, has recently received a lot of attention from the scientific community, also as a consequence of the increasing investments in Artificial Intelligence technologies for the legal domain (LegalTech). The authors of this paper deem as crucial the research and implementation of compliance checkers that can directly process data in RDF format, as nowadays more and more (big) data in this format are becoming available worldwide, across a multitude of different domains. Among the automated technologies that have been used in recent literature, to the best of our knowledge, only two of them have been evaluated with input states of affairs encoded in RDF format. This paper formalizes a selected use case in these two technologies and compares the implementations, also in terms of simulations with respect to shared synthetic datasets

Mesenteric closure with polymer-ligating clips after right colectomy with complete mesocolic excision for cancer and mesentery-based ileocolic resection for Crohn's disease

Mesenteric closure following right colectomy remains controversial and, following the advent of laparoscopic surgery, many surgeons do not routinely close the mesentery after colorectal resection. Nevertheless, especially after the introduction of operations such as right colectomy with complete mesocolic excision and ileocolic resections with extensive mesentery removal for Crohn's disease, the wide mesenteric defect resulting from the dissections can certainly expose the patients to complications such as internal hernias or volvuli. In general, mesenteric closure requires intracorporeal suturing. We describe a simple technique for the closure of the mesentery after surgical resection using polymer-ligating clips. This novel technique seems to minimize the time, effort and risk inherent to the procedure, even after large mesenteric excisions

Unsupervised and supervised text similarity systems for automated identification of national implementing measures of European directives

The automated identification of national implementations (NIMs) of European directives by text similarity techniques has shown promising preliminary results. Previous works have proposed and utilized unsupervised lexical and semantic similarity techniques based on vector space models, latent semantic analysis and topic models. However, these techniques were evaluated on a small multilingual corpus of directives and NIMs. In this paper, we utilize word and paragraph embedding models learned by shallow neural networks from a multilingual legal corpus of European directives and national legislation (from Ireland, Luxembourg and Italy) to develop unsupervised semantic similarity systems to identify transpositions. We evaluate these models and compare their results with the previous unsupervised methods on a multilingual test corpus of 43 Directives and their corresponding NIMs. We also develop supervised machine learning models to identify transpositions and compare their performance with different feature sets

Disclosure of Information to Potential Subjects on Research Recruitment Web Sites

We examined systematically how a sample of Web sites that recruit participants for research on particular diseases present studies to potential subjects, exploring the presence of information about research benefits, risks, procedures, and incentives, including monetary incentives. Such data can elucidate the degree to which federal guidance is being followed and may have potential implications for policy, suggesting areas that IRBs, policy-makers, and regulators may want to consider further regarding online recruiting of research participant