The objective of this study was to determine the biochemical basis for genetic variability in pyruvate,Pi dikinase (PPDK) activity among inbred lines of maize (Zea mays L.). Although in vitro PPDK activity varied more than 5-fold among eight maize inbreds, immunochemical determinations of the proportion of leaf soluble protein as PPDK revealed no significant differences among the inbreds. Genet...

BACKGROUND In neonatal units and human milk banks freezing breastmilk at less than -20 °C is the choice for preserving it. Scientific evidence in relation to the loss of nutritional quality during freezing is rare. Our main aim in this study is to determine the effect of freezing time up to 3 months on the content of fat, total nitrogen, lactose, and energy. Our secondary aim is to assess wheth...

Natural fibers are promising for engineering applications due to their low cost. They are abundantly available in tropical and subtropical regions of the world, and they can be employed as construction materials. Among natural fibers, bamboo has been widely used for housing construction around the world. Bamboo is an optimized composite material which exploits the concept of Functionally Graded...

We introduce a framework for the study of nonlinear homogenization problems in the setting of stationary continuous processes in compact spaces. The latter are functions f ◦ T : Rn × Q → Q with f ◦ T (x, ω) = f(T (x)ω) where Q is a compact (Hausdorff topological) space, f ∈ C(Q) and T (x) : Q → Q, x ∈ Rn, is an n-dimensional continuous dynamical system endowed with an invariant Radon probabilit...

Based on an analytic semigroup setting, we first consider semilinear reaction–diffusion equations with spatially quasiperiodic coefficients in the nonlinearity, rapidly varying on spatial scale ε. Under periodic boundary conditions, we derive quantitative homogenization estimates of order ε on strong Sobolev spaces H in the triangle 0 < γ < min(σ − n/2, 2− σ). Here n denotes spatial dimension. ...

In birds, the noncoding control region (CR) and its flanking genes are the only parts of the mitochondrial (mt) genome that have been modified by intragenomic rearrangements. In raptors, two noncoding regions are present: the CR has shifted to a new position with respect to the "ancestral avian gene order," whereas the pseudo-control region (PsiCR) is located at the original genomic position of...

We are interested in the homogenization of heat transfer in periodic porous media where the fluid part is made of long thin parallel cylinders, the diameter of which is of the same order than the period. The heat is transported by conduction in the solid part of the domain and by conduction, convection and radiative transfer in the fluid part (the cylinders). A non-local boundary condition mode...

This paper presents a new adaptive multiscale homogenization scheme for the simulation of damage and fracture in concrete structures. A two-scale homogenization method, coupling meso-scale discrete particle models to macroscale finite element models, is formulated into an adaptive framework. A continuum multiaxial failure criterion for concrete is calibrated on the basis of fine-scale simulatio...

In this part of the work, the Eshelby tensors of a finite spherical domain are applied to various homogenization procedures estimating the effective material properties of multiphase composites. The Eshelby tensors of a finite domain can capture the boundary effect of a representative volume element as well as the size effect of the different phases. Therefore their application to homogenizatio...

The classical problem of homogenization of elliptic operators in arbitrary domains with periodically oscillating coefficients is considered. As the period goes to zero, an asymptotic analysis of the corresponding sequence of operators is performed with the help of this new method which we call in a natural way the Fourier homogenization method, since it is based on the standard Fourier transfor...