The absorption and metabolism of modified amino acids in processed foods

The chemical reactions involved in the modifications of amino acids in processed food proteins are described. They concern the Maillard reaction, reaction with polyphenols and tannins, formation of lysinoalanine during alkaline and heat treatments, formation of isopeptides, oxidation reaction of the sulfur amino acids, and isomerization of the L-amino acids into their D-form. Information on the digestion, absorption, and urinary excretion of the reaction products obtained by using conventional nutritional tests is given. The studies that have been made on the metabolism of these molecules by using a radioisotopic approach to follow their kinetics in the organism after ingestion are also reviewed. This approach provides unique data on the quantitation of the metabolic pathways and on the kinetics of the metabolic processes involved.     

Monads with arities and their associated theories

After a review of the concept of “monad with arities” we show that the category of algebras for such a monad has a canonical dense generator. This is used to extend the correspondence between finitary monads on sets and Lawvere’s algebraic theories to a general correspondence between monads and theories for a given category with arities. As an application we determine arities for the free groupoid monad on involutive graphs and recover the symmetric simplicial nerve characterisation of groupoids.     

Theory of evidence — A survey of its mathematical foundations,applications and computational aspects

The mathematical theory of evidence has been introduced by Glenn Shafer in 1976 as a new approach to the representation of uncertainty. This theory can be represented under several distinct but more or less equivalent forms. Probabilistic interpretations of evidence theory have their roots in Arthur Dempster's multivalued mappings of probability spaces. This leads to random set and more generally to random filter models of evidence. In this probabilistic view evidence is seen as more or less probable arguments for certain hypotheses and they can be used to support those hypotheses to certain degrees. These degrees of support are in fact the reliabilities with which the hypotheses can be derived from the evidence. Alternatively, the mathematical theory of evidence can be founded axiomatically on the notion of belief functions or on the allocation of belief masses to subsets of a frame of discernment. These approaches aim to present evidence theory as an extension of probability theory. Evidence theory has been used to represent uncertainty in expert systems, especially in the domain of diagnostics. It can be applied to decision analysis and it gives a new perspective for statistical analysis. Among its further applications are image processing, project planning and scheduling and risk analysis. The computational problems of evidence theory are well understood and even though the problem is complex, efficient methods are available.Research partly supported by Grants No. 21-30186.90 and 21-32660.91 of the Swiss National Foundation for Scientific Research.