Many insects, including the model holometabolous insect Drosophila melanogaster, display remarkable plasticity in chill tolerance in response to the thermal environment experienced during development or as adults. At low temperatures, many insects lose the ability to regulate Na(+) balance, which is suggested to cause a secondary loss of hemolymph water to the tissues and gut lumen that concent...

Empirical methods for building natural language systems has become an important area of research in recent years. Most current approaches are based on propositional learning algorithms and have been applied to the problem of acquiring broad-coverage parsers for relatively shallow (syntactic) representations. This paper outlines an alternative empirical approach based on techniques from a sub el...

When exposed to temperatures below their critical thermal minimum (CT(min)), insects enter chill-coma and accumulate chilling injuries. While the critical thermal limits of water-breathing marine animals may be caused by oxygen- and capacity-limitation of thermal tolerance (OCLT), the mechanisms are poorly understood in air-breathing terrestrial insects. We used thermolimit respirometry to char...

Yersinia enterocolitica is a food-borne pathogen with the ability to grow at cold temperatures and tolerate high osmolarity. The bacterium tolerates osmotic stress by intracellular accumulation of osmolytes, such as betaine. The proP gene and proU operon of Y. enterocolitica were sequenced, and single (ProP(-) ProU(+) and ProP(+) ProU(-)) and double (ProP(-) ProU(-)) mutants were generated. Upo...

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of blast freezing and blanching in combination followed by chilling, on the antioxidant activity (ARP), phenols, ascorbic acid and colour of broccoli, carrots and green beans. No significant changes (p > 0.05) in ARP of blanched frozen (BLFR) broccoli, carrot and green beans were observed. In contrast, UBFR (unblanched frozen) treatments...

The cooling of olives stored in containers with a capacity 400 kg risk accumulation respiration heat and subsequent fruit deterioration. Pre-cooling the to 5 °C before cold storage was studied as possible solution overcome this obstacle. temperature within recorded daily for 14 days oil extracted at 0, 4, 8, 14. A second experiment evaluated rapid pre-cooling procedure -18 3 min. No significant...

A polarimetric radar covariance matrix model is described to study the behavior of the co-to-cross covariances in precipitation. The 2 3 2 propagation matrix with attenuation, differential attenuation, and differential phase is coupled to the backscatter matrix leading to a propagation-modified covariance matrix model. System polarization errors are included in this model as well. This model is...

This study, using vitamin C (ascorbic acid) as ‘marker’, allowed a direct comparison of the nutritional quality of fresh vegetables at various stages of distribution and storage, with the same vegetable commercially quick-frozen and stored deep frozen for up to 12 months. The nutrient status of frozen peas and broccoli was similar to that of the typical market-purchased vegetable and was superi...

A systematic experimental procedure for fish shelf-life modelling was used to develop a model for predicting the quality of fish in the chill chain. For this, the growth of the naturally occurring bacteria pseudomonads, Shewanella putrefaciens, Enterobacteriaceae, lactic acid bacteria and yeasts, on gilt-head seabream (Sparus aurata), was studied at temperatures from 0 to 15 degrees C. The resu...

Inhibition of Clostridium perfringens germination and outgrowth by salts of organic acids such as sodium lactate, sodium acetate, buffered sodium citrate and buffered sodium citrate supplemented with sodium diacetate was evaluated during continuous chilling of ground turkey. Turkey breast meat was injected with a brine-containing NaCl, potato starch and potassium tetra pyrophosphate to yield fi...