Deforestation ?1 is the product of complex interaction among local idiosyncratic properties of natural and social systems and driving forces that commonly operate at large spatial scales (1). Social and economic globalization, particularly reduced communication and transportation barriers, has increased the relative importance of global drivers of environmental change (e.g. deforestation). For ...

A sensitive and selective analytical method for the determination of pindone in agricultural products by LC-MS/MS was developed. Pindone was extracted with acetone, and an aliquot of the crude extract was re-extracted with hexane. For lipid-rich samples, the crude extract was further cleaned up by acetonitrile-hexane partitioning. The extract was cleaned up on a tandem graphitized carbon-silica...

This paper investigates differentiated product pricing and the effects of vertical organization under imperfect competition. We use a Cournot model to examine the relationship between price margins and market concentrations in a vertical sector involving multi-product firms producing differentiated products. The analysis relies on vertical measures of concentration (termed VHHI) to study how th...

Two agro-industrial coproducts, soybean cotyledon fiber and distiller's dried grains with solubles (DDGS), were used as substrates to evaluate the effect of coculturing three different fungi, Aspergillus oryzae, Trichoderma reesei, and Phanerochaete chrysosporium, on enzyme production by solid-state fermentation (SSF). When soybean fiber was used as the substrate, a maximum xylanase activity of...

Isoflavone in soybean and its products have numerous beneficial health effects. A number of clinical studies have demonstrated that dietary soy isoflavone can relieve menopausal symptoms, lower risks of breast cancer, and lower cholesterol and glucose. Among the various effects of isoflavone, the role of cholesterol and glucose reduction seems to be well documented; however, other effects such ...

The need to meet animal protein demand of ever growing world population, currently at approximately 6.8 billion (US Census Bureau, 2010), is set to increase at an even greater rate as the economies of developing countries improve and their growing affluent populace alter their dietary habits. This means production of soybean, which is used extensively as animal feed, must increase beyond curren...

Owing to the labelling requirements of food and feed products containing materials derived from genetically modified organisms, quantitative detection methods have to be developed for this purpose, including the necessary certified reference materials and calibrator standards. To date, for most genetically modified organisms authorized in the European Union, certified reference materials derive...

Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) or microsatellites are very useful molecular markers, owing to their locus-specific codominant and multiallelic nature, high abundance in the genome, and high rates of transferability across species. The soybean aphid (Aphis glycines Matsumura) has become the most damaging insect pest of soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) in North America, since it was first found i...

High-performance liquid chromatographic methods were developed for the isolation and quantitative determination of the group B soyasaponins, including 2,3-dihydro-2,5-dihydroxy-6-methyl-4H-pyran-4-one (DDMP)-conjugated soyasaponins alphag, betag, and betaa, and their non-DDMP counterparts, soyasaponins V, I, and II, respectively, with formononetin used as the internal standard. The limits of qu...