The design of a pumpkin thrower was assigned to three Mechanical Engineering Technology students as a project for senior level "ETME 475 Mechanical Systems Design" course. As a first step, each student worked on their own pumpkin thrower. During the final phase, students worked on the design and manufacturing of the different parts of the project. During the early Fall semester one student, wit...

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is a common disease in elderly men. Although it is a nonmalignant disease, it can have a significant impact on the quality of life of elderly men. The pumpkin seed is claimed to be useful in the management of BPH. This investigation analysed the chemical composition of pumpkin seeds and examined its effect on citral-induced hyperplasia of the prostate in Wista...

In this study, we investigated the effects of reducing fat levels from 30% to 25, 20, and 15% by substituting pork fat with water and pumpkin fiber (2%) on the quality of frankfurters compared with control. Decreasing the fat concentration from 30% to 15% significantly increased moisture content, redness of meat batter and frankfurter, cooking loss, and water exudation, and decreased fat conten...

BACKGROUND Vegetables, apart from having high nutritional value, also contain considerable amounts of dietary fibre and other components, which may affect physico-chemical properties of fermented milks, e.g. viscosity, texture, susceptibility to syneresis, flavour profile etc. The present work was established to study the effect of selected vegetables addition on the rheological, textural, micr...

Currently there are no efficient stable transformation methods for pumpkin. In this work we report an efficient genetic transient transformation method of whole pumpkin (Cucurbita maxima cv. Big Max, a dicot) plants in the cotyledonary stage via direct inoculation of Agrobacterium tumefaciens and A. rhizogenes. A vector harboring a uidA-GFP translational fusion and the Cauliflower mosaic virus ...

The objective of this study was to develop a cereal-pulse complementary food fortified with different concentrations of pumpkin powder (Cucurbita moschata), and to analyse its sensory and physic-chemical parameters. Fresh pumpkins(Cucurbita moschata) were procured from the market and dehydrated and powdered in the laboratory. Sorghum (Sorghum vulgare) and whole green gram (Vigna radiate) were g...

The enzymic conversion of proglobulin to globulin catalyzed by the extracts of vacuoles isolated from developing pumpkin (Cucurbita sp. cv Kurokawa Amakuri Nankin) cotyledons was investigated. The endoplasmic reticulum fraction isolated from the developing cotyledons pulselabeled with [(35)S]methionine was shown to contain mainly the radiolabeled proglobulin, which was used as a substrate for a...

Protein isolates of pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo L) seeds were hydrolyzed by acid protease to prepare antioxidative peptides. The hydrolysis conditions were optimized through Box-Behnken experimental design combined with response surface method (RSM). The second-order model, developed for the DPPH radical scavenging activity of pumpkin seed hydrolysates, showed good fit with the experiment data with...

Following in vitro infection with Agrobacterium rhizogenes wild strain (mannopine, 8196) and two A. tumefaciens transconjugant strains (C58C1 pArA4abc and C58C1 pArA4b) transformed (hairy) roots were induced in pumpkin (C. pepo L.) cotyledons. The presence of pRi T-DNA in pumpkin long-term hairy root cultures was determined by Southern hybridization. The influence of plant growth regulators on ...

The use of pasteurization units (PU) as a measure of the lethal effect of processes was proposed with the aim of comparing conventional and novel thermal technologies. Kiwifruit puree was subjected to microwave (1000 and 900 W) and conventional (97 C) heating. Processing conditions of the treatments were chosen to simulate a pasteurization treatment. The temperature profiles of the samples duri...