Background: Beetroot has been used as a source of dietary nitrate supplementation, a precursor for the endogenous synthesis of nitric oxide, which improves endothelial function and displays protective effects against cardiovascular diseases. Methods: The aim of this study was to formulate an attractive and well-tolerated beetroot-derivative containing high levels of nitrate and antioxidant compounds, able to reduce blood pressure in hypertensive patients following chronic ingestion. A beetroot-cereal bar was prepared from a mixture of beetroot juice, beetroot chips and cereals. Sixty grams of the beetroot-cereal bar were administered to five hypertensive patients recruited from a cardiovascular medical service for 3-week supplementation. At the end of this period, the patients were examined at the routine hospital clinical service at 8:20 AM after a rest of 20 min. Results: The nitrate contents of the beetroot-cereal bar were 15.3±0.05 mmol·100 g-1, which also contained 8.64±1.85 mg·100 g-1 of saponins, 9.19±0.71 mg·g-1 of organic acids and 147.73±3.3 mg·100 g-1 of phenolic compounds. Beetroot-cereal bars displayed a shelf life of at least 30 days with no preservative addition. A rheological evaluation of the beetroot-cereal bars indicated the predominance of a dark red color and crispy texture. The beetroot-cereal bar displayed high overall acceptability and purchase intent. The chronic consumption of beetroot-cereal bar by hypertensive patients led to ˜-14.0 mm Hg decrease in systolic and ˜-6.5 mm Hg decrease in diastolic blood pressures. Conclusion: Beetroot-cereal bars may be a new attractive strategy to offer high levels of bioaccessible dietary nitrate and antioxidant compounds that can aid in the improvement of cardiovascular function. Keywords: beetroot-cereal bar, antioxidant activity, rheological characteristics, blood pressure, chronic consumption.

a-amanitin is a polypeptide isolated from the fruiting body of Amanita exitialis. It is the main toxin in wild mushrooms and toxic, often lethal, in animal and humans. In this study, the artificial nucleic acid aptamers targeting a-amanitin were screened by Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SELEX) in vitro, in order to develop an analytical tool for a-amanitin detection. The specificity of aptamer H06 with a-amanitin was confirmed using Enzyme-Linked OligoNucleotide Assay (ELONA) and Dot blot, and no non-specific was observed. Based on the ELONA platform, the minimum detectable concentration of aptamer H06 for a-amanitin was 8 ng/mL. The circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy experiment indicated aptamer H06 forms a stem-loop and intramolecular G-quadruplex and it can stable exist in binding buffer and PBS buffer. Moreover, the affinity test showed a strong binding force between a-amanitin and the aptamer H06, with the dissociation constant (KD) of 37.5±5.135 nM. And the accurary of the ELONA assay based on aptame H06 was demonstrated in real mushroom samples. In summary, our data could demonstrate a possibility of the development of apta-based diagnostic platform and detection method for a-amanitin. Keywords: a-amanitin, circular dichroism spectroscopy, DNA aptamer, ELONA, SELEX.

Background Family and school context plays an important role in education and may affect children’s eating behavior. The first aim of this study was to describe the energy and nutrient intake derived from snacks brought from home to school in children 8-11 years old. Secondly, we investigated the association of snacking nutritional features with child and parents’ weight status. Methods The study involved 109 students and their parents in an elementary school of Milan (Italy). On four randomized experimental days, teachers took a picture of their snacks. Data about nutritional composition was obtained by MetaDieta program or from nutritional labels. Anthropometric measurements were taken in children, while parents’ weight and height information was obtained via self-report. Data was analyzed using general linear regression models. Results Complete and valid data was obtained for 95 students (52 males and 43 females) and their parents. 15% of the sample never brought any snack to school. 46.2% of the snacks were packaged. In particular, 36.8% were sweet and 9.4% savory items. 23.8% were sugary drinks, such as fruit juice or cold iced tea. Consumption of fresh fruit, yoghurt or dried nuts was very low. The average energy intake derived from snacks was 205 kcal (±74). No significant difference in snacking behaviors was observed in relation to sex or nationality. No significant association was found between energy intake derived from snacks and children’s body mass index z score (r= -0.04, p=0.7), however we found a direct and significant correlation, adjusted for age, education level and nationality with maternal body mass index (b= 0.36, p=0.01). Conclusion This study suggests that during school age mothers play an important role in the control of children’s food intake and that their nutritional status may affect food choices for their children. Educational interventions involving the whole family should be encouraged in order to prevent imbalanced food behaviors in children. Keywords: family food habits, obesity, parents, weight status

This study investigated the feasibility of using grape pomace (GP) as a source of dietary fiber (DF) and polyphenol for extruded corn-based product and evaluated the impacts of GP level on the physical properties and chemical composition of extrudates. A 4x3 two-factor factorial design was used to for extrusion experiment. The two factors were the level of GP inclusion (0, 2.5, 5.0 and 10%) and moisture content (13, 15 and 17%) of the formula. The extrusion was conducted at pre-determined temperature, feeding rate and screw speed using a twin-screw extruder. Data show that adding GP in the formula caused product darkening, decreased product expansion ratio (ER), hardness and brittleness (P<0.05). The feed moisture showed greater impacts on the ER and texture than GP content. Lower feed moisture (=15%) resulted in crunchy product with better puffy properties at all GP level. Addition of GP increased total dietary fiber and polyphenol contents in dose-dependent manner (P<0.0001) and reduced in vitro starch digestibility of extrudate (P<0.05). Therefore, GP has great potential to serve as DF and polyphenol source in extrusion cooking, but the extrusion parameter such as GP content and moisture must be well controlled to minimize the undesirable effect of GP on product. Key Words: Extrusion, Grape pomace, Color, Expansion Ratio, Texture, Dietary Fiber, Polyphenol, Starch Digestion

Antioxidant from shrimp waste was extracted and purified by silica gel glass column chromatography. Antioxidant activity was measured for crude and purified fractions. Both crude extract and purified fractions were applied into sablefish mince and stored at refrigerator and freezer temperatures for various times. Crude extract, and 0.20% and 0.50% (w/w) purified antioxidant from shrimp waste significantly lowered TBA and peroxide values of sablefish minces stored at 40C for 8 days and frozen for 120 days, respectively. Results indicated that crude extract and 0.20% and 0.50% purified antioxidant effectively inhibited lipid oxidation. After 120 days of storage, 0.20% antioxidant had significantly higher free fatty acid content than those of other treatments, while 0.10% and 0.50% antioxidant had significantly higher free fatty acid production compared to other samples after 4 days storage at 40C. Keywords: Natural Antioxidant, Sable fish mince, lipid oxidation

Aim: To promote sustainable development, the smart city implies a global vision that merges artificial intelligence, big data, decision making, information and communication technology (ICT), and the internet-of-things (IOT). These processes above are related for solving real life problems. Food is one of the basic needs of human being. World population is increasing day by day. So it has become important to grow sufficient amount of crops to feed such a huge population. But with the time passing by, plants are affected with various kinds of diseases, which cause great harm to the agricultural plant productions. Beside that many countries economy greatly depends on agricultural productivity and it’s also a need for a country to attain agricultural productivity of basic agricultural product for the people of that particular country. Detection of plant disease through some automatic technique is beneficial as it requires a large amount of work of monitoring in big farm of crops, and at very early stage itself it detects symptoms of diseases means where they appear on plant leaves. Methods: 1. k-means clustering, Basic Morphological functions, Naïve Bayesian classifier, Color Co-Occurrence method. 2. K-means clustering algorithm with SVM, Color co-occurrence method. 3. Color co-occurrence methods, Multi SVM classifier. 4. Bhattacharaya’s similarity calculation. 5. Genetic algorithm, Arduino, Masking the green pixel and color co-occurrence method and so on. Results: This paper gives the survey on different diseases classification techniques that can be used for plant leaf disease detection and an algorithm for image segmentation technique used for automatic detection as well as classification of plant leaf diseases has been described later. Jute, Grape, Paddy, okra are some of those species on which the algorithms and methods were tested. Conclusion: With very less computational efforts the optimum results were obtained which also shows the efficiency of algorithm in recognition and classification of the leaf diseases. Another advantage of using these methods is that the plant diseases can be identified at early stage or the initial stage. To improve recognition rate in classification process Artificial Neural Network, Fuzzy Logic and hybrid algorithms can also be used. Keywords: Disease detection, Different image processing for plants, k-means clustering, clustering algorithm with SVM, Color co-occurrence methods, Bhattacharaya’s similarity calculation and so on.