The stability and state of aggregation of aqueous fibrinogen (FB) and dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) vesicles in water or buffer at 25 degrees C were studied with dynamic light scattering (DLS), UV-vis spectroturbidimetry (ST), and cryo-transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM). In water, when 1000 ppm (0.10 wt %) DPPC dispersions were prepared with a protocol including extensive sonic...

Fumonisin B₁ (FB₁) is often a co-contaminant with aflatoxin (AF) in grains and may enhance AF's carcinogenicity by acting as a cancer promoter. Calcium montmorillonite (i.e. NovaSil, NS) is a possible dietary intervention to help decrease chronic aflatoxin exposure where populations are at risk. Previous studies show that an oral dose of NS clay was able to reduce AF exposure in a Ghanaian popu...

ROUTINE ANALYSES of quality components of sugarcane for calibration development of near infra-red spectroscopic applications are enhanced if hydraulic press extraction of juice is used. This results in high-level extraction comparable to that achieved by the first mill in a commercial milling train. A bonus is that fibre also can be estimated with this process. Scepticism has been expressed wit...

Fumonisin B(1) (FB(1)) is a mycotoxin produced by Fusarium spp. moulds that contaminate crop, predominantly maize, all around the world. More than 15 types of fumonisins have been indentified so far, but FB(1) is the most abundant and toxicologically the most significant one. FB(1) has a wide range of toxic effects, depending on animal species. In horses FB(1) causes equine leukoencephalomalaci...

Natural mycoflora and co-occurrence of fumonisins (FB(1), FB(2)) and aflatoxins (AFB(1), AFB(2), AFG(1) and AFG(2)) in freshly harvested corn grain samples from four regions of Brazil were investigated. Fusarium verticillioides was predominant in all samples. Analysis of fumonisins showed that 98% of the samples were contaminated with FB(1) and 74.5% with FB(1) + FB(2), with toxin levels rangin...

We consider a complex system composed of many non-identical parts where (i) the dynamics of each part are Ornstein–Uhlenbeck; (ii) all parts are driven by a common external Lévy noise; and (iii) the system’s collective output is the averaged aggregate of the outputs of its parts. Whereas the dynamics on the ‘microscopic’ parts-level are Markov, the dynamics on the ‘macroscopic’ system-level are...

We analyze the extension of the well known relation between Brownian motion and Schrödinger equation to the family of Lévy processes. We propose a Lévy– Schrödinger equation where the usual kinetic energy operator – the Laplacian – is generalized by means of a pseudodifferential operator whose symbol is the logarithmic characteristic of an infinitely divisible law. The Lévy–Khintchin formula sh...

We model the power-law stability in distribution of returns for S&P500 index by the GARCH process which we use to account for the long memory in the variance correlations. Precisely, we analyze the distributions corresponding to temporal aggregation of the GARCH process, i.e., the sum of n GARCH variables. The stability in the power-law tails is controlled by the GARCH parameters. We model the ...

It is proposed a class of statistical estimators Ĥ = (Ĥ1, . . . , Ĥd) for the Hurst parameters H = (H1, . . . , Hd) of fractional Brownian field via multi-dimensional wavelet analysis and least squares, which are asymptotically normal. These estimators can be used to detect self-similarity and long-range dependence in multi-dimensional signals, which is important in texture classification and i...

Of about 10 billion bushels of corn that are grown each year in the United States, less than 2% is processed directly into food products, and about 18% is processed into intermediates such as high-fructose corn syrup, ethanol, and cornstarch. The vast majority of the annual crop is used domestically for animal feed (60%), and about 16% is exported. Thus, any program for controlling residues of ...