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Hydrocolloids are widely used in meat products as common food additives. However, research has indicated that excessive consumption of these hydrocolloids may have potential health implications. Currently, consumers mainly rely on sensory evaluation to identify hydrocolloid adulteration in meat products. Although many studies on quantitative detection of hydrocolloids have been conducted by biochemical methods in laboratory environments, there is currently a lack of effective tools for consumers and regulators to obtain real-time and reliable information on hydrocolloid adulteration. To address this challenge, a smartphone-based computer vision method was developed to quantitatively detect carrageenan adulteration in beef in this work. Specifically, Swin Transformer models, along with pre-training and fine-tuning techniques, were used to successfully automate the classification of beef into nine different levels of carrageenan adulteration, ranging from 0% to 20%. Among the tested models, Swin-Tiny (Swin-T) achieved the highest trade-off performance, with a Top-1 accuracy of 0.997, a detection speed of 3.2 ms, and a model size of 103.45 Mb. Compared to computer vision, the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy achieved a lower accuracy of 0.792 and required a constant temperature environment and a waiting time of around 30 min for data stabilization. In addition, Swin-T model was also capable of distinguishing between different types of hydrocolloids with a Top-1 accuracy of 0.975. This study provides consumers and regulators with a valuable tool to obtain real-time quantitative information about meat adulteration anytime, anywhere. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: This research provides a practical solution for regulators and consumers to non-destructively and quantitatively detect the content and type of hydrocolloids in beef in real-time using smartphones. This innovation has the potential to significantly reduce the costs associated with meat quality testing, such as the use of chemical reagents and expensive instruments., (© 2024 Institute of Food Technologists.)

Understanding the water state in Nafion is not only crucial for operating a proton-exchange membrane (PEM)-based fuel cell, but also intimately related to the elucidation of the proton transport mechanism in a PEM. Although many studies have been published on this subject, some controversies and ambiguities remain unresolved. In this work, we design three different types of Nafion samples by substituting protons with lithium or sodium cations. We also pay special attention to the preparation of samples for carrying out broad-range variable temperature solid state NMR experiments so that no membrane dehydration occurs during the long experimental time at low temperatures. With these precautions and improvements, clear and largely straightforward information could be obtained to ensure minimal ambiguity and complexity in the interpretation of the experimental data. Our results show that about 40-60% of water remains unfrozen at -70 °C, depending on the type of the substituting cation. Both the 1 H and 2 H spectral and relaxation results indicate that water freezing starts from the center of the nanopores inside Nafion and increases gradually as the temperature decreases. The protons remain dissociated with sulfonate groups even at the lowest temperature we reached (-70 °C), whereas both lithium and sodium are associated with sulfonate groups at most temperatures below 0 °C. The experimental data also suggest that besides frozen and unfrozen water, there is broad distribution of water state and dynamics in Nafion as the temperature is lowered from above zero down to -70 °C. The effect of the size of the substituting cation significantly affects the properties of supercooled water by modifying the cation-water interaction and impeding the rotation of sulfonate groups. These novel results not only help us in establishing a better understanding of the water state in Nafion and its performance as a proton exchange mebrane, but also provide insights into water freezing, antifreeze and supercooling in other nanoscopic environments.

PSYCHE homonuclear decoupling, a prominent pure shift NMR method, is successfully applied to adulteration discrimination of honey and geographical originality identification of tea. Effects of homonuclear couplings are efficiently suppressed, producing resolution-enhanced spectra. The pair wise honey and tea samples are well separated in OPLS-DA models with high predictability. Due to the well-resolved and accurate assignment of singlet resonances after decoupling, PSYCHE is advantageous in the identification of differential components and accurate quantification of compound concentrations presented by enhanced volcano and Beeswarm plots of honey samples, while the analysis of NOESY is easily interfered by overlapped resonances, which is further proved by the STOCSY analysis, displaying the spectral stability and reproducibility. Experimental results show that PSYCHE can improve the spectral resolution of natural complex products such as honey and tea and be combined with multivariate statistical analysis and serve as a supplementary technique to the standard methods, especially for samples systems composed by a few high-content compounds., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Contrast enhancement agents are often employed in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for clinical diagnosis and biomedical research. However, the current theory on MRI contrast generation does not consider the ubiquitous presence of macromolecular crowders in biological systems, which poses the risk of inaccurate data interpretation and misdiagnosis. To address this issue, herein the macromolecular crowding effects on MRI contrast agent are investigated with the 1 H relaxation rate of water in aqueous solutions of Dotarem with different concentrations of macromolecules. Two representative macromolecular crowder systems are used: polyethylene glycol (with no specific secondary structure) and bovine serum albumin (with compact secondary and tertiary structures). The water 1 H relaxation rates in various solutions are measured in a fixed magnetic field and in variable magnetic fields. The results show significant crowding effects for both crowders. The relaxation rate is proportional to the concentration of the MRI contrast agent but shows conspicuous superlinearity with respect to the concentration of the crowder. The size of polyethylene glycol does not affect the relaxivity of water in Dotarem solutions. The above effects are verified with T 1 - and T 2 -weighted NMR microimages. These results highlight the importance of the effect of macromolecular crowding on the MRI contrast agent and are valuable for understanding the mechanism of MRI contrast agents and designing new-generation MRI contrast agents.

Phosphorus metabolism and circulation are essential bio-physicochemical processes during development of a plant and have been extensively studied and known to be affected by temperature, humidity, lighting, hormones etc. However, a quantitative description of how various phosphorous species evolve over time has not been reported. In this work, a combined 31 P liquid and solid state NMR spectroscopic methodology is employed, supported by a new extraction scheme and data analysis method, to carry out a quantitative investigation of phosphorous circulation in germinating sesame seeds in dark and under illumination with and without adding a growth hormone. The spectra show that only slight changes occur for phosphorous metabolism at the initial stage but a rapid change takes place between 48-96 hours after germination is started. The metabolism is found to be temperature dependent and affected by illumination and hormone. However, neither illumination nor hormone affects the final residual concentration of phytin. Moreover, phytin does not flow out of cotyledon and the phosphorous flowing to other parts of the plant is always in the inorganic form. The overall evolution profile of phytate consumption is found to be a Gaussian decaying function. These findings can be explained with a dynamic model on phytin conversion.

The copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) reaction is a powerful tool for bioconjugation of biomolecules, particularly proteins and peptides. The major drawback limiting the use of the CuAAC reaction in biological systems is the copper-mediated formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), leading to the oxidative degradation of proteins or peptides. From the studies on a limited number of proteins and peptides, it is known that, in general, the copper mediated oxidative damage is associated with the copper coordination environment and solvent accessibility. However, there is a lack of data to help estimate the extent of copper-mediated oxidation on a wide range of proteins and peptides. To begin to address this need, we quantitatively measured the degree of copper-mediated oxidation on libraries of 1200 tetrapeptides and a model protein (bovine serum albumin, BSA) using liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS). The collected data will be useful to researchers planning to use the CuAAC reaction for bioconjugaton on peptides or proteins.

Background and Purpose: Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has become an important technique for tissue studies. Since tissues are in semisolid-state, their high-resolution (HR) spectra cannot be obtained by conventional NMR spectroscopy. Because of this restriction, extraction and high-resolution magic angle spinning (HR MAS) are widely applied for HR NMR spectra of tissues. However, both of the methods are subject to limitations. In this study, the feasibility of HR (1)H NMR spectroscopy based on intermolecular multiple-quantum coherence (iMQC) technique is explored using fish muscle, fish eggs, and a whole fish as examples., Materials and Methods: Intact salmon muscle tissues, intact eggs from shishamo smelt and a whole fish (Siamese algae eater) are studied by using conventional 1D one-pulse sequence, Hadamard-encoded iMQC sequence, and HR MAS., Results: When we use the conventional 1D one-pulse sequence, hardly any useful spectral information can be obtained due to the severe field inhomogeneity. By contrast, HR NMR spectra can be obtained in a short period of time by using the Hadamard-encoded iMQC method without shimming. Most signals from fatty acids and small metabolites can be observed. Compared to HR MAS, the iMQC method is non-invasive, but the resolution and the sensitivity of resulting spectra are not as high as those of HR MAS spectra., Conclusion: Due to the immunity to field inhomogeneity, the iMQC technique can be a proper supplement to HR MAS, and it provides an alternative for the investigation in cases with field distortions and with samples unsuitable for spinning. The acquisition time of the proposed method is greatly reduced by introduction of the Hadamard-encoded technique, in comparison with that of conventional iMQC method.