The present study was conducted to assess the suitability of blends of two sweet potato (creamand yellowflesh) varieties and maize flours in the preparation of crunchy snacks. Each of the sweet potato varieties was prepared into flour and separately blended with 0, 30 and 50% of maize flour. The blends were evaluated for proximate composition, mineral content, vitamin content, anti-nutrient fac...

Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and related Ipomoea species are frequently infected by monopartite begomoviruses (genus Begomovirus, family Geminiviridae), known as sweepoviruses. Unlike other geminiviruses, the genomes of sweepoviruses have been recalcitrant to rendering infectious clones to date. Thus, Koch's postulates have not been fullfilled for any of the viruses in this group. Three novel...

Animals may use sweet taste to predict the caloric contents of food. Eating sweet noncaloric substances may degrade this predictive relationship, leading to positive energy balance through increased food intake and/or diminished energy expenditure. These experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that experiences that reduce the validity of sweet taste as a predictor of the caloric or nut...

Serotonergic involvement has been implicated in preferential consumption of treat foods. We tested the effect of acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) on food consumption by overweight and lean adults with and without a history of recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD). ATD and taste-matched placebo challenges were administered double-blind in counter-balanced order. Participants were classified ...

Sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam., is an important food and industrial material crop throughout the world. It is also an alternative source of bio-energy as a raw material for fuel production. China is the biggest sweet potato producer in the world. Biotechnology offers great potential for improving disease, pest and stress resistance and nutritional quality of sweet potato. In the past d...

Chemosensation in C. elegans Worms have a very simple chemosensory system composed of 32 neurons. Despite this simplicity, they are capable of detecting and appropriately responding to a Dallas, Texas 75235-9111 wide range of chemicals (Bargmann et al. Lucretius, one of the early Greek atomists, suggested have shown that chemoattraction to a number of mole-that all substances having odor gave o...

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) was used to evaluate the energy efficiency and environmental impacts of sweet potato-based bioethanol production. The scope covered all stages in the life cycle of bioethanol production, including the cultivation and treatment, transport, as well as bioethanol conversion of sweet potato. Results show that the net energy ratio of sweet potato-based bioethanol is 1.48 ...

Citrus is one of the most important and widely grown fruit crop with global production ranking firstly among all the fruit crops in the world. Sweet orange accounts for more than half of the Citrus production both in fresh fruit and processed juice. We have sequenced the draft genome of a double-haploid sweet orange (C. sinensis cv. Valencia), and constructed the Citrus sinensis annotation proj...

T1r3 is a critical subunit of T1r sweet taste receptors. Here we studied how the absence of T1r3 impacts responses to sweet stimuli by taste neurons in the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) of the mouse. The consequences bear on the multiplicity of sweet taste receptors and how T1r3 influences the distribution of central gustatory neurons. Taste responses to glycine, sucrose, NaCl, HCl, and quin...

This paper shows how intermodulation distortion, IMD, sweet spots can be used as a practically meaningful technology to design highly linear microwave power amplifiers. It starts by reviewing the physical origins of these points of large signal to nonlinear distortion ratio, distinguishing the ones uniquely determined by the active device’s quiescent point – small-signal IMD sweet spots – from ...