The production of good quality larvae is a challenge in marine fish hatcheries. In this study, the proteome profile of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) was analyzed using 2-DE, MALDI TOF MS and LC-MS / MS in order to determine its protein composition. Out of 109 abundant spots analyzed with MS 77 proteins were identified. The identified proteins were classified into 5 groups: structural proteins (56%), cytosolic proteins (29%), mitochondrial proteins (7%), secreted and extracellular proteins (7%) and nuclear proteins (1%). This study is the first step in a future construction of an Atlantic cod protein database that will be a valuable resource for molecular analysis of marine fish larval development.
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BACKGROUND: Shrimp wastes contain high-quality protein that is underutilized, and particularly peptides derived from shrimp wastes (normally used as animal feed) have not been utilized for bioactive properties. Hence the objective was to utilize shrimp waste proteins in generating peptides and to investigate these for cancer antiproliferative activities. The objectives involved hydrolyzing shrimp proteins (intact in shell) using a food-grade Cryotin enzyme, obtaining gastrointestinal resistant peptides, fractionation to generate <10, 10–30 and> 30 kDa fractions, and evaluating for colon and liver cancer cell growth inhibitory effects . Three shrimp shells — whole langostino lobster shells from El Salvador (South America), shrimp shells from St. Petersburg, FL (USA), and shrimp shell whites from the Gulf of Mexico, LA (USA) —were evaluated for the study.
RESULTS: Peptide fractions (<10 and 10–30 kDa) obtained from shrimp shell whites (Gulf of Mexico) as well as from langostino shells (El Salvador) significantly inhibited the growth of both colon and liver cancer cells by 60%, while <10 kDa fraction from shrimp shells (FL) inhibited growth of liver cancer cells alone by 55%, compared to controls.
CONCLUSION: The promising anticancer peptide fractions from shrimp waste proteins has the potential for novel nutraceutical ingredient applications.
A statistically robust method was applied to 83 time-series of mercury in Arctic biota from marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems with the purpose of generating a 'meta-analysis' of temporal trend data collected over the past two to three decades, mostly during the auspices of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP). Sampling locations ranged from Alaska in the west to northern Scandinavia in the east. Information from recently published temporal trend studies was tabulated to supplement the results of the statistical analyzes. No generally consistent trend was evident across tissues and species from the circumpolar Arctic during the last 30 years or so. However, there was a clear west-to-east gradient in the occurrence of recent increasing Hg trends, with larger numbers and a higher proportion of biotic datasets in the Canadian and Greenland region of the Arctic showing significant increases than in the North Atlantic Arctic. Most of the increasing datasets were for marine species, especially marine mammals. A total of 16 (19%) out of the 83 time-series could be classified as “adequate”, where adequate is defined as the number of actual monitoring years in a time-series being equal to or greater than the number of years of sampling required to detect a 5% annual change in Hg concentrations, with a significance level of P <0.05 and 80% statistical power. At the time of the previous AMAP Assessment, only 10% of the Hg time-series were deemed adequate. If an additional 5 years of data were to be added to the current set of time-series, it is predicted that 53% of time-series would become adequate.
Meat and meat products are of high nutritional value; however, they frequently provide salt and fat in high amounts, which can have negative health effects when consumed in excess. We investigated salt- and fat-reduced meat products, ie sensory evaluation and consumer surveys were carried out as well as a dietary intervention study was carried out in overweight individuals who used salt- and fat-reduced products as a part of an energy-restricted diet. Although differences were detected in the sensory evaluation between reduced and regular meat products, the participants in the consumer surveys and in the dietary intervention study gave good ratings for the fat and fat-reduced meat products. The intervention study led to weight loss and improved cardiovascular risk, but did not reveal side effects associated with the consumption of these products. Our study indicates that such products are well accepted by potential consumers and can be included successfully in a weight loss program.
This book presents a comprehensive review of various biological and ecological studies in animal science, including their embryology, evolution, classification, habitats and distribution. Topics discussed herein include cod aquaculture; the evolutionary history and habitats of the caucasian rock lizard; neuronal plasticity in the lizard brain; the house dust mite and allergic airway inflammation in asthma; special characteristics of the formation of population structure in Pacific cod and novel methodologies to assess metabolic changes of Atlantic cod (gadus Morhua) larvae in response to environmental factors.
The effects of added potassium ferrocyanide (CN) in different concentrations (2.5 ppm, 7.5 ppm and 100 ppm), in salt, on lipid oxidation in cod during salting, storage and rehydration were examined in this study. An increase in CN concentration accelerated lipid oxidation of the salted cod, as observed by increases in lipid hydroperoxides (PV) and thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS), as well as in the development of fluorescence compounds (δFor and δFaq). A yellow discolouration (higher b∗ value) of salted cod was associated with higher levels of oxidation derivatives. High correlation between PV, TBARS and free fatty acid (FFA), as well as between FFA and δFor, was found. The results of principal component analysis showed that TBARS, b∗ value and δFor were the strongest indicators of lipid oxidation during salting and storage.
An integrated benefit – risk analysis aims to provide guidance in decision situations where benefits do not clearly prevail over risks, and explicit weighing of benefits and risks is thus indicated. The BEPRARIBEAN project aims to advance benefit – risk analysis in the area of food and nutrition by learning from other fields. This paper constitutes the final stage of the project, in which commonalities and differences in benefit – risk analysis are identified between the Food and Nutrition field and other fields, namely Medicines, Food Microbiology, Environmental Health, Economics and Marketing – Finance, and Consumer Perception . From this, ways forward are characterized for benefit – risk analysis in Food and Nutrition. Integrated benefit – risk analysis in Food and Nutrition may advance in the following ways: Increased engagement and communication between assessors, managers, and stakeholders; more pragmatic problem-oriented framing of assessment; accepting some risk; pre- and post-market analysis; explicit communication of the assessment purpose, input and output; more human (dose – response) data and more efficient use of human data; segmenting populations based on physiology; explicit consideration of value judgments in assessment; integration of multiple benefits and risks from multiple domains; explicit recognition of the impact of consumer beliefs, opinions, views, perceptions, and attitudes on behavior; and segmenting populations based on behavior; the opportunities proposed here do not provide ultimate solutions; rather, they define a collection of issues to be taken account of in developing methods, tools, practices and policies, as well as refining the regulatory context, for benefit – risk analysis in Food and Nutrition and other fields. Thus, these opportunities will now need to be further explored and incorporated into benefit – risk practice and policy. If accepted, incorporation of these opportunities will also involve a paradigm shift in Food and Nutrition benefit – risk analysis towards conceiving the analysis as a process of creating shared knowledge among all stakeholders.
Benefit and risk perception with respect to food consumption, have been a part of human daily life from beginning of time. In today's society the food chain is long with many different types of actors and low degree of transparency. Making informed food choices where knowledge of benefits and risks is part of the decision making process are therefore complicated for consumers. Thus, to understand how consumers perceive benefits and risks of foods, their importance in relation to quality evaluations are aspects that need to be addressed. The objective of this paper is to discuss state of the art in understanding consumer perceptions of benefits and risks of foods in order to improve understanding of consumer behavior in the food domain.
Risks may be associated with both acute and long term consequences, some of which may have serious effects. Perceived risks are connected to morbidity and mortality along two dimensions relating to unknown risk, and to what extent the risk is dreaded by the consumer. Unfamiliar, uncertain, unknown, uncontrollable, and severe consequences are some factors associated with risk perception. Novel food processing techniques, for instance, score high on several of these parameters and are consistently regarded with suspicion and perceived as risky by consumers.
On a daily basis, benefits of foods and food consumption are more important in most consumers' minds than risks. Benefits are often associated with food's ability to assuage hunger, and to provide pleasure through eating and socializing. In addition, two main categories of benefits that are important for acceptance of product innovations are health and environmental benefits.
Benefit and risk perception of foods seem to be inversely correlated, so when something is perceived as being highly beneficial, it is correspondingly perceived as having low risk. However, slightly different paths are used in the formation of these perceptions; benefit perception is based on heuristics and experience, while risk perception is to a greater extent the result of cognitive information processing.
Consumers are particularly conservative when it comes to perception and acceptance of foods compared to other products. Benefit-risk evaluations tend to be skewed towards acceptance of all that is traditional and well-known (benefits), and rejection or suspicion towards anything that is novel or highly processed (risks) regardless of actual risk. Knowledge of how consumers perceive benefits and risks of foods, may contribute to understanding benefit-risk perception in other areas related to personal, societal or environmental perspectives.
All market participants (eg, investors, producers, consumers) accept a certain level of risk as necessary to achieve certain benefits. There are many types of risk including price, production, financial, institutional, and individual human risks. All these risks should be effectively managed in order to derive the utmost of benefits and avoid disruption and / or catastrophic economic consequences for the food industry. The identification, analysis, determination, and understanding of the benefit – risk trade-offs of market participants in the food markets may help policy makers, financial analysts and marketers to make well-informed and effective corporate investment strategies in order to deal with highly uncertain and risky situations.
In this paper, we discuss the role that benefits and risks play in the formation of the decision-making process of market-participants, who are engaged in the upstream and downstream stages of the food supply chain. In addition, we review the most common approaches (expected utility model and psychometrics) for measuring benefit – risk trade-offs in the economics and marketing-finance literature, and different factors that may affect the economic behavior in the light of benefit – risk analyzes .
Building on the findings of our review, we introduce a conceptual framework to study the benefit – risk behavior of market participants. Specifically, we suggest the decoupling of benefits and risks into the separate components of utilitarian benefits, hedonic benefits, and risk attitude and risk perception, respectively. Predicting and explaining how market participants in the food industry form their overall attitude in light of benefit – risk trade-offs may be critical for policy-makers and managers who need to understand the drivers of the economic behavior of market participants with respect to production, marketing and consumption of food products.
Environmental health assessment covers a broad area: virtually all systematic analysis to support decision making on issues relevant to environment and health. Consequently, various different approaches have been developed and applied for different needs within the broad field. In this paper we explore the plurality of approaches and attempt to reveal the state-of-the-art in environmental health assessment by characterizing and explaining the similarities and differences between them. A diverse, yet concise, set of approaches to environmental health assessment is analyzed in terms of nine attributes: purpose, problem owner, question, answer, process, use, interaction, performance and establishment. The conclusions of the analysis underline the multitude and complexity of issues in environmental health assessment as well as the variety of perspectives taken to address them. In response to the challenges, a tendency towards developing and applying more inclusive, pragmatic and integrative approaches can be identified. The most interesting aspects of environmental health assessment are found among these emerging approaches: (a) increasing engagement between assessment and management as well as stakeholders, (b) strive for framing assessments according to specific practical policy needs, (c) integration of multiple benefits and risks, as well as (d) explicit incorporation of both scientific facts and value statements in assessment. However, such approaches are yet to be established, and many contemporary mainstream environmental health assessment practices can still be characterized as relatively traditional risk assessment.