Purpose
Yoghurt is most popular and more acceptable throughout the world because of its general positive image among consumers because of its diverse nutritional and therapeutic properties and can be ...the most suitable probiotic carrier. Key factors for consumer’s inclination towards functional foods are increased awareness for healthy foods because of health deterioration resulting from busy lifestyles, growing healthcare cost and the aspiration for an improved quality life in later years. Yoghurt is still not consumed in certain parts of the world because of a lack of a cultural tradition of consuming yogurt and further people are not aware of the health benefits associated with yogurt consumption. In this study an attempt has been to project probiotic yoghurt as a functional food in the current era of self-care and complementary medicine.
Design/methodology/approach
Attempt has been made to review the literature on the biochemical activities of yoghurt cultures and their behavior in association with diverse probiotic cultures. Both review and research papers related to biochemical activities and functional properties of yoghurt cultures in association with probiotics and their health benefits published in diverse journals under Pub Med and Science Direct have been considered. Keywords used for data search included functional foods, yoghurt, probiotic, health benefits, etc.
Findings
Functional properties of yoghurt can be further enhanced with fortification of minerals and vitamins or inclusion of probiotic cultures. Diversity in biochemical behavior yoghurt cultures in association with different probiotic cultures has been reported. Conjugated application of probiotics with yoghurt cultures would result in a product with enhanced functional properties to extend health benefits.
Originality/value
Inclusion of probiotic cultures in yoghurt is suggested to extend the functional properties of normal yoghurt, thus providing necessary nutrients, improving health and preventing or reducing nutrition-related diseases. Regular intake of probiotic yoghurt is suggested for healthy lifestyles, as it will help in retaining their health and reduce the potentially long-term risk of disease. Food industries can have profit-driven business by projecting the probiotic yoghurt as a functional food.
Purpose
Globally, consumer’s inclination towards functional foods had noticed due to their greater health consciousness coupled with enhanced health-care cost. The fact that probiotics could promote ...a healthier gut microbiome led projection of probiotic foods as functional foods and had emerged as an important dietary strategy for improved human health. It had established that ice cream was a better carrier for probiotics than fermented milked due to greater stability of probiotics in ice cream matrix. Global demand for ice cream boomed and probiotic ice cream could have been one of the most demanded functional foods. The purpose of this paper was to review the technological aspects and factors affecting probiotic viability and to standardize methodology to produce functional probiotic ice cream.
Design/methodology/approach
Attempt was made to search the literature (review and researched papers) to identify diverse factors affecting the probiotic viability and major technological challenge faced during formulation of probiotic ice cream. Keywords used for data searched included dairy-based functional foods, ice cream variants, probiotic ice cream, factors affecting probiotic viability and health benefits of probiotic ice cream.
Findings
Retention of probiotic viability at a level of >106 cfu/ml is a prerequisite for functional probiotic ice creams. Functional probiotic ice cream could have been produced with the modification of basic mix and modulating technological parameters during processing and freezing. Functionality can be further enhanced with the inclusion of certain nutraceutical components such as prebiotics, antioxidant, phenolic compounds and dietary fibres. Based upon reviewed literature, suggested method for the manufacture of functional probiotic ice cream involved freezing of a probiotic ice cream mix obtained by blending 10% probiotic fermented milk with 90% non-fermented plain ice cream mix for higher probiotic viability. Probiotic ice cream with functional features, comparable with traditional ice cream in terms of technological and sensory properties could be produced and can crop up as a novel functional food.
Originality/value
Probiotic ice cream with functional features may attract food manufacturers to cater health-conscious consumers.
Internal gravity waves are a key process linking the large-scale mechanical forcing of the oceans to small-scale turbulence and mixing. In this review, we focus on internal waves generated by ...barotropic tidal flow over topography. We review progress made in the past decade toward understanding the different processes that can lead to turbulence during the generation, propagation, and reflection of internal waves and how these processes affect mixing. We consider different modeling strategies and new tools that have been developed. Simulation results, the wealth of observational material collected during large-scale experiments, and new laboratory data reveal how the cascade of energy from tidal flow to turbulence occurs through a host of nonlinear processes, including intensified boundary flows, wave breaking, wave-wave interactions, and the instability of high-mode internal wave beams. The roles of various nondimensional parameters involving the ocean state, roughness geometry, and tidal forcing are described.
The 'standard' model of cosmology is founded on the basis that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating at present - as was inferred originally from the Hubble diagram of Type Ia ...supernovae. There exists now a much bigger database of supernovae so we can perform rigorous statistical tests to check whether these 'standardisable candles' indeed indicate cosmic acceleration. Taking account of the empirical procedure by which corrections are made to their absolute magnitudes to allow for the varying shape of the light curve and extinction by dust, we find, rather surprisingly, that the data are still quite consistent with a constant rate of expansion.
Global climate change has led to concerns about its impact on our biosphere and vegetation. Any impact of climate on vegetation can manifest in terms of changes in plant growth characteristics, its ...health and timing of different vegetative phenomena, such as germination, bud burst, maturity, etc. The duration and changes in the timing of plant growth stages can in turn impact the global carbon cycle. Similarly any change in plant productivity, because of changing climate will alter the carbon flux pattern by changing the overall biological flux being added or taken away from the atmosphere. We have used satellite data to study spatiotemporal changes in the plant phenology and plant productivity over the Continental USA (CONUS) to get an overall understanding of the evolution of these metrics over the past decade. Our study reveals that the prairies situated in the heartland of CONUS have become an increasingly important player in determining any changes in vegetation induced carbon source/sink patterns. The northern Great Plains has shown increased fixation of carbon in recent years, while the southern Plains has become a carbon source. This has been largely driven by changes in recent weather patterns where the northern plains have seen an increasingly cooler and wetter growing season whereas the southern plains have at the same time seen increased aridity, especially since 2011. This is also reflected in increasing growing season greenness values over the northern Plains and the opposite over the southern Plains. The gradual changing pattern of land biological fluxes over CONUS, as documented in this paper will likely be of interest to climate modellers as they seek to better understand the interaction between global carbon balance and climate change.
Purpose
Consumer inclination towards probiotic foods has been stimulated due to well-documented evidence of health benefits of probiotic-containing products and consumer demand for natural products. ...It is assumed that the viability and metabolic activities of probiotics are essential for extending health benefits and for successful marketing of probiotics as a functional food. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that even dead or inactivated probiotic cells could extend health benefits, indicating that probiotic viability is not always necessary for exhibiting health benefits.
Design/methodology/approach
Attempt has been made to review the literature on the status of probiotic foods available in the world market, their impact on the gut flora and the various factors affecting their viability. Both review and research papers related to efficacy of inactivated, killed or dead probiotic cells towards health benefits have been considered. Keywords used for data search included efficacy of viable or killed, inactivated probiotic cells.
Findings
The reviewed literature indicated that inactivated, killed or dead probiotic cells also possess functional properties but live cells are more efficacious. All live probiotic cultures are not equally efficacious, and accordingly, dead or inactivated cells did not demonstrate functional properties to extend health benefits to all diseases.
Originality/value
Capability of non-viable microorganisms to confer health benefits may attract food manufacturers owing to certain advantages over live probiotics such as longer shelf-life, handling and transportation and reduced requirements for refrigerated storage and inclusion of non-bacterial, biologically active metabolites present in fermented milks’ fraction as dried powders to food matrixes may result in the development of new functional foods.
We theoretically study the vertical structure of the edge-on low surface brightness (LSB) galaxy UGC 7321. This is one of the few well-observed LSBs. We modeled it as a gravitationally coupled disk ...system of stars and atomic hydrogen gas in the potential of the dark matter halo and treated the realistic case where the rotation velocity varies with radius. We used a dense and compact halo as implied by the observed rotation curve in this model. We calculated the thickness of stellar and HI disks in terms of the half-width at half-maximum of the vertical density distribution in a region of R = 0–12 kpc using input parameters constrained by observations. We obtain a mildly increasing disk thickness up to R = 6 kpc, in a good agreement with the observed trend, and predict a strong flaring beyond this. To obtain this trend, the stellar velocity dispersion has to fall exponentially at a rate of 3.2RD, while the standard value of 2RD gives a decreasing thickness with radius. Interestingly, both stellar and HI disks show flaring in the outer disk region although they are dynamically dominated by the dark matter halo from the very inner radii. The resulting vertical stellar density distribution cannot be fit by a single sech2/n function, in agreement with observations, which show wings at larger distances above the mid-plane. Invoking a double-disk model to explain the vertical structure of LSBs as done in the literature may therefore not be necessary.
Here we describe a robust, microfluidic technique to generate and analyze 3D tumor spheroids, which resembles tumor microenvironment and can be used as a more effective preclinical drug testing and ...screening model. Monodisperse cell-laden alginate droplets were generated in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic devices that combine T-junction droplet generation and external gelation for spheroid formation. The proposed approach has the capability to incorporate multiple cell types. For the purposes of our study, we generated spheroids with breast cancer cell lines (MCF-7 drug sensitive and resistant) and co-culture spheroids of MCF-7 together with a fibroblast cell line (HS-5). The device has the capability to house 1000 spheroids on chip for drug screening and other functional analysis. Cellular viability of spheroids in the array part of the device was maintained for two weeks by continuous perfusion of complete media into the device. The functional performance of our 3D tumor models and a dose dependent response of standard chemotherapeutic drug, doxorubicin (Dox) and standard drug combination Dox and paclitaxel (PCT) was analyzed on our chip-based platform. Altogether, our work provides a simple and novel, in vitro platform to generate, image and analyze uniform, 3D monodisperse alginate hydrogel tumors for various omic studies and therapeutic efficiency screening, an important translational step before in vivo studies.
PDF
