Antioxidant,Antimicrobial, and Metabolomic Characterization of Blanched Pomegranate Peel Extracts: Effect of Cultivar

Hot water blanching at 80 °C for 3 min can be used as a novel pre-treatment step in pomegranate peel to preserve the integrity of the phytochemical content within the peel extracts by lowering or inactivating enzymes such as polyphenol (PPO) oxidase and peroxidase (POD) that are responsible for the break-down of phytochemicals within the peel. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of hot water blanching pre-treatment on yield, bioactive compounds, antioxidants, enzyme inactivation, and antibacterial activity of ‘Wonderful’, ‘Acco’, and ‘Herskawitz’ pomegranate peel extracts. We used a variety of spectrophotometric-based assays and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS)-based approach to characterize and quantify metabolites within the peel extracts. Blanching significantly (p < 0.05) reduced PPO activity in all peel extracts, with the highest PPO reduction in ‘Herskawitz’ peel extracts at 0.25 U/mL. Furthermore, higher antioxidant activity in ‘Herskawitz’ blanched peel extracts using 2,2-diphenyl-1-picryl hydrazyl (DPPH) antioxidant activity, ferric ion reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), and 2,2-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic acid (ABTS) radical scavenging activity at 567.78 ± 9.47 µmol Trolox/g DM, 800.05 ± 1.60 µmol Trolox/g DM, and 915.27 ± 0.61 µmol Trolox/g DM, respectively, was noted. ‘Herskawitz’ blanched peel extracts were recorded with the lowest minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) value of 80 µg/mL for Gram-positive Bacillus subtilis and Gram-negative Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria strains. A total of 30 metabolites were present in ‘Acco’ and ‘Herskawitz’ peel extracts and were tentatively identified after LC-MS profiling. This study demonstrates that blanched peel extracts from ‘Herskawitz’ cultivar have great potential for commercial use in value-added products in the nutraceutical, cosmeceutical, and pharmacological industries.     

A new factorization technique of the matrix mask of univariate refinable functions

Summary. A univariate compactly supported refinable function can always be written as the convolution product , with the B-spline of order k,f a compactly supported distribution, and k the approximation orders provided by the underlying shift-invariant space . Factorizations of univariate refinable vectors were also studied and utilized in the literature. One of the by-products of this article is a rigorous analysis of that factorization notion, including, possibly, the first precise definition of that process. The main goal of this article is the introduction of a special factorization algorithm of refinable vectors that generalizes the scalar case as closely (and unexpectedly) as possible: the original vector is shown to be `almost' in the form , with F still compactly supported and refinable, andk the approximation order of . The algorithm guarantees F to retain the possible favorable properties of , such as the stability of the shifts of and/or the polynomiality of the mask symbol. At the same time, the theory and the algorithm are derived under relatively mild conditions and, in particular, apply to whose shifts are not stable, as well as to refinable vectors which are not compactly supported. The usefulness of this specific factorization for the study of the smoothness of FSI wavelets (known also as `multiwavelets' and `multiple wavelets') is explained. The analysis invokes in an essential way the theory of finitely generated shift-invariant (FSI) spaces, and, in particular, the tool of superfunction theory. Received June 10, 1998 / Revised version received June 14, 1999 / Published online August 2, 2000     

Homogenous projective factors for actions of semi-simple Lie groups

We analyze the structure of a continuous (or Borel) action of a connected semi-simple Lie group G with finite center and real rank at least 2 on a compact metric (or Borel) space X, using the existence of a stationary measure as the basic tool. The main result has the following corollary: Let P be a minimal parabolic subgroup of G, and K a maximal compact subgroup. Let λ be a P-invariant probability measure on X, and assume the P-action on (X,λ) is mixing. Then either λ is invariant under G, or there exists a proper parabolic subgroup Q⊂G, and a measurable G-equivariant factor map ϕ:(X,ν)→(G/Q,m), where ν=∫ _K kλdk and m is the K-invariant measure on G/Q. Furthermore, The extension has relatively G-invariant measure, namely (X,ν) is induced from a (mixing) probability measure preserving action of Q. Oblatum 14-X-1997 & 18-XI-1998 / Published online: 20 August 1999     

Structural and thermal characterization of L‐arginine dihydrate ‐ a nonlinear optical material

Crystal structure and thermal stability of the hydrated crystals of the basic amino acid L‐arginine named as L‐arginine dihydrate (LAD), a nonlinear optical material have been reported here. The title compound crystallized in the space group P2₁2₁2₁ with Z=4 and unit cell dimensions a=11.856(2)Å, b=15.694(2)Å, c=5.664(3)Å. The arginine molecule is a zwitterion with the guanidyl group accepting an extra proton from the carboxylate group. DTA‐TG analysis gives an idea about the thermal behaviour of LAD and ruled out the possibility of structural changes independent of mass changes. © 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim