The testing and rapid detection of pathogenic organisms is a crucial protocol in the prevention and identification of crises related to health, safety and wellbeing. Pathogen detection has become one ...of the most challenging aspects in the food and water industries, because of the rapid spread of waterborne and foodborne diseases in the community and at significant costs. With the prospect of inevitable population growth, and an influx of tourism to certain water bodies testing will become a requirement to control and prevent possible outbreaks of potentially fatal illnesses. The legislation is already particularly rigorous in the food industry, where failure to detect pathogenic materials represents a catastrophic event, particularly for the elderly, very young or immune-compromised population types. In spite of the need and requirement for rapid analytical testing, conventional and standard bacterial detection assays may take up to seven days to yield a result. Given the advent of new technologies, biosensors, chemical knowledge and miniaturisation of instrumentation this timescale is not acceptable. This review presents an opportunity to fill a knowledge gap for an extremely important research area; discussing the main techniques, biology, chemistry, miniaturisation, sensing and the emerging state-of-the-art research and developments for detection of pathogens in food, water, blood and faecal samples.
The increasing desire to control quality in foods in real-time (e.g. on-line, at line, market) demands the development of innovative and easy to use analytical systems e.g. a combination of sensors ...with multivariate data analysis (MVA). It has been long established that the ability to analyse complex chemical samples such as foods is now essential to achieve the consistent quality demanded by consumers, to ensure uniformity and consistency within a brand and even to avoid fraud, which can have direct implications when it comes to food integrity. It is well known that a broad range of factors (e.g. chemical, physical properties) contribute to the sensory characteristics of foods (e.g. smell, taste and colour) including the origin of raw materials and processing steps. In such complex matrices the use of sensor systems combined with MVA (chemometrics) is especially promising as tools for an encompassing analysis and understanding of these contributing factors.
This article reviews recent applications of near infrared sensors (conventional and functional spectroscopy) for the measurement, monitoring and prediction of aroma and taste in several food matrices.
•Sensory properties of foods are very important to determine food quality.•Rapid analytical methods based in spectroscopy are currently used by the food industry.•The measurement and prediction of sensory parameters using NIR is discussed.
Additively manufactured selective laser melted titanium (SLM-Ti) opens the possibility of tailored medical implants for patients. Despite orthopedic implant advancements, significant problems remain ...with regard to suboptimal osseointegration at the interface between the implant and the surrounding tissue. Here, we show that applying a nanodiamond (ND) coating onto SLM-Ti scaffolds provides an improved surface for mammalian cell growth while inhibiting colonization of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. Owing to the simplicity of our methodology, the approach is suitable for coating SLM-Ti geometries. The ND coating achieved 32 and 29% increases in cell density of human dermal fibroblasts and osteoblasts, respectively, after 3 days of incubation compared with the uncoated SLM-Ti substratum. This increase in cell density complements an 88% reduction in S. aureus detected on the ND-coated SLM-Ti substrata. This study paves a way to create facile antifouling SLM-Ti structures for biomedical implants.
Using the structural vector autoregressive methodology, we present estimates of monetary transmission for the new and future EU member countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Unlike most previous ...research we include ten transition countries. We examine to what extent monetary transmission in these countries is related to financial structure indicators, using an approach similar to that used by Cecchetti Cecchetti, Stephen G., 1999. Legal structure, financial structure, and the monetary policy transmission mechanism. Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review 5 (2), 9–28 to investigate this issue for eleven old EU member countries. Unlike Cecchetti's results for the old EU member countries, we find little evidence of any link between financial structure indicators and monetary policy for these ten accession countries.
Journal of Comparative Economics
34 (1) (2006) 1–23.
Abstract Objectives This study aims to (1) elucidate whether the Hawthorne effect exists, (2) explore under what conditions, and (3) estimate the size of any such effect. Study Design and Setting ...This systematic review summarizes and evaluates the strength of available evidence on the Hawthorne effect. An inclusive definition of any form of research artifact on behavior using this label, and without cointerventions, was adopted. Results Nineteen purposively designed studies were included, providing quantitative data on the size of the effect in eight randomized controlled trials, five quasiexperimental studies, and six observational evaluations of reporting on one's behavior by answering questions or being directly observed and being aware of being studied. Although all but one study was undertaken within health sciences, study methods, contexts, and findings were highly heterogeneous. Most studies reported some evidence of an effect, although significant biases are judged likely because of the complexity of the evaluation object. Conclusion Consequences of research participation for behaviors being investigated do exist, although little can be securely known about the conditions under which they operate, their mechanisms of effects, or their magnitudes. New concepts are needed to guide empirical studies.
All cellular life contains an extensive array of membrane transport proteins. The vast majority of these transporters have not been experimentally characterized. We have developed a bioinformatic ...pipeline to identify and annotate complete sets of transporters in any sequenced genome. This pipeline is now fully automated enabling it to better keep pace with the accelerating rate of genome sequencing. This manuscript describes TransportDB 2.0 (http://www.membranetransport.org/transportDB2/), a completely updated version of TransportDB, which provides access to the large volumes of data generated by our automated transporter annotation pipeline. The TransportDB 2.0 web portal has been rebuilt to utilize contemporary JavaScript libraries, providing a highly interactive interface to the annotation information, and incorporates analysis tools that enable users to query the database on a number of levels. For example, TransportDB 2.0 includes tools that allow users to select annotated genomes of interest from the thousands of species held in the database and compare their complete transporter complements.
Bacterial multidrug efflux pumps have come to prominence in human and veterinary pathogenesis because they help bacteria protect themselves against the antimicrobials used to overcome their ...infections. However, it is increasingly realized that many, probably most, such pumps have physiological roles that are distinct from protection of bacteria against antimicrobials administered by humans. Here we undertake a broad survey of the proteins involved, allied to detailed examples of their evolution, energetics, structures, chemical recognition, and molecular mechanisms, together with the experimental strategies that enable rapid and economical progress in understanding their true physiological roles. Once these roles are established, the knowledge can be harnessed to design more effective drugs, improve existing microbial production of drugs for clinical practice and of feedstocks for commercial exploitation, and even develop more sustainable biological processes that avoid, for example, utilization of petroleum.
Starmerella bombicola is a non-conventional yeast mainly known for its capacity to produce high amounts of the glycolipids 'sophorolipids'. Although its product has been used as biological detergent ...for a couple of decades, the genetics of S. bombicola are still largely unknown. Computational analysis of the yeast's genome enabled us to identify 254 putative transporter genes that make up the entire transportome. For each of them, a potential substrate was predicted using homology analysis, subcellular localization prediction and RNA sequencing in different stages of growth. One transporter family is of exceptional importance to this yeast: the ATP Binding Cassette (ABC) transporter Superfamily, because it harbors the main driver behind the highly efficient sophorolipid export. Furthermore, members of this superfamily translocate a variety of compounds ranging from antibiotics to hydrophobic molecules. We conducted an analysis of this family by creating deletion mutants to understand their role in the export of hydrophobic compounds, antibiotics and sophorolipids. Doing this, we could experimentally confirm the transporters participating in the efflux of medium chain fatty alcohols, particularly decanol and undecanol, and identify a second sophorolipid transporter that is located outside the sophorolipid biosynthetic gene cluster.
The Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement was developed to improve the reporting of randomised controlled trials. It was initially published in 1996 and focused on the ...reporting of parallel group randomised controlled trials. The statement was revised in 2001, with a further update in 2010. A separate CONSORT statement for the reporting of abstracts was published in 2008. In earlier papers we considered the implications of the 2001 version of the CONSORT statement for the reporting of cluster randomised trial. In this paper we provide updated and extended guidance, based on the 2010 version of the CONSORT statement and the 2008 CONSORT statement for the reporting of abstracts.
Scedosporium fungi are found in various natural and host-associated environments, including the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients. However, their role in infection development remains underexplored. ...Here the attachment of conidia of a virulent S. aurantiacum strain WM 06.482 onto the human lung epithelial A549 cells in vitro was visualized using microscopy to examine the initial steps of infection. We showed that 75-80% of fungal conidia were bound to the A549 cells within four hours of co-incubation, and started to produce germ tubes. The germinating conidia seemed to invade the cells through the intercellular space, no intracellular uptake of fungal conidia by the airway epithelial cells after conidial attachment. Transcriptomic analysis of the A549 cells revealed that the up-regulated genes were mainly associated with cell repair and inflammatory processes indicating a protective response against S. aurantiacum infection. Network analysis of the differentially expressed genes showed activation of the innate immune system (NF-kB pathway) leading to the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines. We believe this is the first report showing the transcriptomic response of human alveolar epithelial cells exposed to S. aurantiacum conidia paving a way for better understanding of the mechanism of the infection process.
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