Kinetics of moisture loss applied to the baking of snacks with pregelatinized cassava starch.

Moisture loss kinetics is a complex process defined as the liquid removal from a solid by thermal application. The purposes of the study were to obtain kinetic curves of moisture loss during the baking of cassava snacks and establish which processes govern the moisture loss, recognize which mathematical models describe the moisture loss curves more precisely, and determine activation energy (Ea) and effective diffusivity (Deff ). Experimental data were obtained through baking at four temperatures formulations for snacks with different dehydrated cassava puree (DCP) proportions. Page's and Chávez Méndez's models showed the best fits. We calculated Deff and Ea employing the analytical solution of Fick's Second Law for the geometry of plane plates. Deff values increase with DCP but did not show a trend. The range found was from 5.22E-06 to 2.93E-05 m2 /s. The results of Ea showed that the mixture of flours produced an increase in the energy necessary to initiate the effective diffusion (24.84 kJ/mol) compared to the samples without mixing (15.54 kJ/mol). Moisture loss curves show that the diffusion process governs a large part of the process. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: Given the need to increase research for the development of the cassava industry, which currently has low competitiveness compared to less expensive products such as corn, various efforts are being made to generate new products that can replace wheat flour, at least in part. However, it is necessary to research how this substitution affects the various steps of the production system, including baking. During baking, one of the most significant processes is moisture loss. In this sense, the kinetic modeling of the moisture loss process parameters is mainly helpful in the food industry. The mathematical models of moisture loss processes are used to design new or improved baking systems or even control the process.

Statistical properties of the variation at linked microsatellite loci: implications for the history of human Y chromosomes.

It has recently been suggested that observed levels of variation at microsatellite loci can be used to infer patterns of selection in genomes and to assess demographic history. In order to evaluate the feasibility of these suggestions it is necessary to know something about how levels of variation at microsatellite loci are expected to fluctuate due simply to stochasticity in the processes of mutation and inheritance (genetic sampling). Here we use recently derived properties of the stepwise mutation model to place confidence intervals around the variance in repeat score that is expected at mutation-drift equilibrium and outline a statistical test for whether an observed value differs significantly from expectation. We also develop confidence intervals for the time course of the buildup of variation following a complete elimination of variation, such as might be caused by a selective sweep or an extreme population bottleneck. We apply these methods to the variation observed at human Y-specific microsatellites. Although a number of authors have suggested the possibility of a very recent sweep, our analyses suggest that a sweep or extreme bottleneck is unlikely to have occurred anytime during the last approximately 74,000 years. To generate this result we use a recently estimated mutation rate for microsatellite loci of 5.6 x 10(-4) along with the variation observed at autosomal microsatellite loci to estimate the human effective population size. This estimate is 18,000, implying an effective number of 4,500 Y chromosomes. One important general conclusion to emerge from this study is that in order to reject mutation-drift equilibrium at a set of linked microsatellite loci it is necessary to have an unreasonably large number of loci unless the observed variance is far below that expected at mutation-drift equilibrium.

Aspects of nonrandom turnover involved in the concerted evolution of intergenic spacers within the ribosomal DNA of Drosophila melanogaster.

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-amplified, sequenced, and digitally typed intergenic spacers (IGSs) of the ribosomal (r)DNA in D. melanogaster reveal unexpected features of the mechanisms of turnover involved with the concerted evolution of the gene family. Characterization of the structure of three isolated IGS length variants reveals breakage "hot spots" within the 330-base-pair (bp) subrepeat array found in the spacers. Internal mapping of variant repeats within the 240-bp subrepeat array using a novel digital DNA typing procedure (minisatellite variant repeat [MVR]-PCR) shows an unexpected pattern of clustering of variant repeats. Each 240-bp subrepeat array consists of essentially two halves with the repeats in each half identified by specific mutations. This bipartite structure, observed in a cloned IGS unit, in the majority of genomic DNA of laboratory and wild flies and in PCR-amplified products, has been widely homogenized yet is not predicted by a model of unequal crossing over with randomly placed recombination breakpoints. Furthermore, wild populations contain large numbers of length variants in contrast to uniformly shared length variants in laboratory stocks. High numbers of length variants coupled to the observation of a homogenized bipartite structure of the 240-bp subrepeat array suggest that the unit of turnover and homogenization is smaller than the IGS and might involve gene conversion. The use of PCR for the structural analysis of members of the rDNA gene family coupled to digital DNA typing provides powerful new inroads into the mechanisms of DNA turnover affecting the course of molecular evolution in this family.