The effects of a waiting period at room temperature ( approximately 22 degrees C) before refrigerating fresh-cut watermelon, cantaloupe and honeydew pieces contaminated with Salmonella on survival of the inoculated pathogen were investigated. Whole cantaloupes, honeydew melons and watermelons were washed with water, and fresh-cut pieces from individual melons were prepared and inoculated with a...

      Ginger plant, Zingiber officinale Roscoe, is an important tropical plant used as spices and well known for its medicinal properties. It has a pungent and aromatic rhizome rich of zingiberen and gingerols. Many secondary metabolites are known to accumulate in the plant cell culture systems. So, in this research, gingerols and zingiberene production of callus cultures were compared...

In this paper we study the two-dimensional non-guillotine cutting problem, the problem of cutting rectangular pieces from a large stock rectangle so as to maximize the total value of the pieces cut. The problem has many industrial applications whenever small pieces have to be cut from or packed into a large stock sheet. We propose a tabu search algorithm. Several moves based on reducing and ins...

Intact jicama (Pachyrhizus erosus) roots are chilling sensitive, but quality of fresh-cut pieces (1.8 × 4.5 cm cylinders) was best maintained at low storage temperatures (0 to 5 °C). Respiration rates of different piece sizes were similar, and averaged 2, 7 and 10 μL CO 2·g –1·h–1 at 0 °C, 5 °C and 10 °C, respectively. Storage in air at 5 °C to 10 °C resulted in surface browning and was associa...

We introduce test tube systems based on operations that are closely related to the splicing operation, i.e. we consider the operations of cutting a string at a specific site into two pieces with marking them at the cut ends and of recombining two strings with specifically marked endings. Whereas in the splicing of two strings these strings are cut at specific sites and the cut pieces are recomb...

The influences of processing and storage on the quality indices and nutritional content of fresh-cut fruits were evaluated in comparison to whole fruits stored for the same duration but prepared on the day of sampling. Fresh-cut pineapples, mangoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, strawberries, and kiwifruits and whole fruits were stored for up to 9 days in air at 5 degrees C. The postcutting life ba...

In this paper we consider the problem of finding a graph separator of a given size that decomposes the graph into the maximum number of connected components. We present the picture of the computational complexity and the approximability of this problem for several natural classes of graphs. We first provide an overview of the hardness of approximation of this problem, which stems mainly from it...

On a two-dimensional cake, there are m pairwise-disjoint toppings. It is required to cut the cake to m + b pieces, such that each topping is entirely contained in a unique piece, and the total number of empty pieces (b, ”blanks”) is minimized. The minimal number of blanks naturally depends on the geometric constraints of the cake and its pieces. I present tight bounds on the number of blanks wh...