Impact of packaging properties on the physical-chemical-microbiological-sensory characteristics of Ricotta cheese during storage

Ricotta is a highly perishable cheese of which shelf-life is strongly influenced by the properties of packages in which it is stored. Four plastic packages currently in use in Italy (IT), Romania (RO), Slovenia (SLO), and Spain (SP) are characterized in term of structure, barrier, and antimicrobial properties, and their efficiency in the ricotta storage at 4°C is assessed. Differential scanning calorimetry and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy analysis indicate that the IT and SP packages are made of low-density polyethylene and the RO and SLO packages consist of polyethylene and polyamide 6. Permeability to the water vapour and oxygen transmission rate vary as follows: IT>SLO > RO > SP and SP > IT>RO > SLO, respectively. The SP package expressed the highest antimicrobial inhibition whilst the IT package the lowest. The maximum amounts of volatile compounds in cheese were reached after 3 days in the IT and SP packages and after 6 days in the SLO and RO packages. The score 2.8 for cheese overall acceptability was exceeded after 7 days in the IT, RO, and SP packages and 6 days in the SLO package. Barrier properties of packages significantly influence the shelf-life of ricotta. Low barrier properties resulted in high level of oxygen and water vapours inside the headspace of packages ultimately favour the microbial development. The simultaneous compliance of microbiological safety level and overall acceptability score gives ricotta a shelf-life of 3 days in the IT, RO, and SP packages and 1 day in the SLO package.     

Vitamin D Deficiency in Testicular Cancer Survivors: A Systematic Review

Testicular cancer (TC) is the most frequent tumor in young males. In the vast majority of cases, it is a curable disease; therefore, very often patients experience a long survival, also due to their young age at diagnosis. In the last decades, the role of the vitamin D deficiency related to orchiectomy has become an increasingly debated topic. Indeed, vitamin D is essential in bone metabolism and many other metabolic pathways, so its deficiency could lead to various metabolic disorders especially in long-term TC survivors. In our article, we report data from studies that evaluated the incidence of hypovitaminosis D in TC survivors compared with cohorts of healthy peers and we discuss molecular mechanisms and clinical implications.     

3D Bioprinting of Human Adipose-Derived Stem Cells and Their Tenogenic Differentiation in Clinical-Grade Medium

Defining the best combination of cells and biomaterials is a key challenge for the development of tendon tissue engineering (TE) strategies. Adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) are ideal candidates for this purpose. In addition, controlled cell-based products adherent to good manufacturing practice (GMP) are required for their clinical scale-up. With this aim, in this study, ASC 3D bioprinting and GMP-compliant tenogenic differentiation were investigated. In detail, primary human ASCs were embedded within a nanofibrillar-cellulose/alginate bioink and 3D-bioprinted into multi-layered square-grid matrices. Bioink viscoelastic properties and scaffold ultrastructural morphology were analyzed by rheology and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The optimal cell concentration for printing among 3, 6 and 9 × 10⁶ ASC/mL was evaluated in terms of cell viability. ASC morphology was characterized by SEM and F-actin immunostaining. Tenogenic differentiation ability was then evaluated in terms of cell viability, morphology and expression of scleraxis and collagen type III by biochemical induction using BMP-12, TGF-β3, CTGF and ascorbic acid supplementation (TENO). Pro-inflammatory cytokine release was also assessed. Bioprinted ASCs showed high viability and survival and exhibited a tenocyte-like phenotype after biochemical induction, with no inflammatory response to the bioink. In conclusion, we report a first proof of concept for the clinical scale-up of ASC 3D bioprinting for tendon TE.     

Human pharmacokinetic characterization and in vitro study of the interaction between doxorubicin and paclitaxel in patients with breast cancer

PURPOSE: We performed a pharmacologic investigation of paclitaxel (PTX) infused over 3 hours and bolus doxorubicin (DOX) to assess the role of sequence, interval between drugs, and duration of doxorubicin infusion on paclitaxel and anthracycline plasma disposition. We also explored possible mechanisms of pharmacokinetic interference involving the physiologic role of the multidrug resistance phenotype in anthracycline and taxane biliary excretion. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Pharmacokinetics was performed in 80 cycles and 36 women with previously untreated metastatic breast cancer. PTX, DOX, and their metabolites 6 alpha-hydroxyl-PTX (6 alpha OH-PTX) and doxorubicinol (DOL) were measured by high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC). Human breast cancer MCF-7 wild-type (WT) and resistant (TH) cell lines were cultured in whole human plasma to study anthracycline retention after treatment with different combinations of PTX, Cremophor EL (CEL) (PEG35 castor oil; BASF, Parsippany, NJ), and DOX. RESULTS: Pharmacokinetic interference between PTX and DOX was responsible for nonlinearity of DOX plasma disposition and increased concentrations of DOX and DOL. These effects were PTX dose-dependent, DOX concentration-dependent, and likely a result of interference at the level of liver elimination. In view of the physiologic role of P-glycoproteins (P-gp) in xenobiotic biliary excretion, retention of DOX was assessed in MCF-7 WT and MCF-7 TH cells. Intracellular was significantly higher in MCF-7 WT than MCF-7 TH (P < .05). However, concomitant exposure to DOX, PTX, and CEL caused similar DOX retention in both MCF-7 WT and TH cells. CONCLUSION: PTX, as clinically formulated in CEL, is responsible for a nonlinear disposition of DOX and DOL. Nonlinearity is PTX- and DOX-dependent, and possibly caused by competition for biliary excretion of taxanes and anthracyclines mediated by P-gp. Nonlinearity indicates that even minor modifications of dose and infusion duration of DOX and PTX may lead to unpredictable pharmacodynamic consequences. The postulated role of P-gp suggests that CEL is clinically active, and advises caution in designing combinations of PTX with other drugs that are substrate for P-gp.     

Assessing the reTweet proneness of tweets: predictive models for retweeting

The problem of assessing the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of virality of social network posts is of great value for many activities, such as advertising and viral marketing, influencing and promoting, early monitoring and emergency response. Among the several social networks, Twitter.com is one of the most effective in propagating information in real time, and the propagation effectiveness of a post (i.e., tweet) is related to the number of times the tweet has been retweeted. Different models have been proposed in the literature to understand the retweet proneness of a tweet (tendency or inclination of a tweet to be retweeted). In this paper, a further step is presented, thus several features extracted from Twitter data have been analyzed to create predictive models, with the aim of predicting the degree of retweeting of tweets (i.e., the number of retweets a given tweet may get). The main goal is to obtain indications about the probable number of retweets a tweet may obtain from the social network. In the paper, the usage of the classification trees with recursive partitioning procedure for prediction has been proposed and the obtained results have been compared, in terms of accuracy and processing time, with respect to other methods. The Twitter data employed for the proposed study have been collected by using the Twitter Vigilance study and research platform of DISIT Lab in the last 18 months. The work has been developed in the context of smart city projects of the European Commission RESOLUTE H2020, in which the capacity of communicating information is fundamental for advertising, promoting alerts of civil protection, etc.     

Effect of thermal history on water sorption,elastic properties and the glass transition of epoxy resins

The DGEBA/TETA (diglycidyl ether of bisphenol-A/triethylene tetramine) system was examined in postcuring conditions at 100°C for 3 and 6 days. Sorption kinetics and equilibria at different temperatures and mechanical tests have been performed on the two sets of samples. Thermal treatment of the epoxy resin containing sorbed water affects its subsequent water sorption characteristics, elastic modulus and glass transition temperature. Attention has also been given to the effects on solubility on thermal history in the presence of water. It was observed that the saturation values in such systems are determined once the higher temperature of the thermal cycle is defined. The differences in solubility of samples with different hygrothermal history are explained in terms of microcavities that can be formed by effect of crazing in the plasticized system exposed to high temperatures.     

Tomographic inversion of ocean bottom seismograph (OBS) data: Problems and solutions applied to the NW Svalbard Hydratech data set

The paper is aimed at discussing some problems that may arise in the tomographic inversion of data acquired with particular geometries, as vertical seismic profiles (VSP) or implying the use of Ocean Bottom Seismographs (OBS), and presenting the solutions used to solve them. One problem is due to the limited number of sensors (that may be even a single one) and of their sparseness. This affects the information distribution that is concentrated in the vicinity of each sensor. This fact, together with the second problem, i.e. the strong asymmetry of the ray path, may decrease the reliability of the inversion.Two procedures for irregular adaptive gridding of the reflecting interfaces and single ray datuming are proposed as possible solutions to overcome these obstacles, while obtaining a reliable and highly resolved velocity model in depth: the relative procedures are tested through synthetic models and on real data.     

Expression of α-amylase inhibitors in diploid Triticum species

The aim of the work was to characterize the expression of various α-amylase inhibitors (αAIs), well known anti-nutritional compounds, for the development of healthier diploid wheat-based functional foods.