Consumo, digestibilidade, balanço de nitrogênio e composição bromatológica da torta de murumuru (Astrocaryum murumuru var. murumuru Mart.), na alimentação de ruminantes

Foi avaliado a torta de murumuru (Astrocaryum murumuru var. murumuru, Mart.), oriunda do processamento de amêndoas, após a extração do óleo pela indústria cosmética, sobre os efeitos da substituição dos níveis 0%; 10%, 20%, 40% e 60%, na dieta básica da gramínea mombaça (Panicum maximum cv. Mombaça) sobre o consumo e digestibilidade aparente da matéria seca (CDMS); matéria orgânica (CDMO); extrato etéreo (CDEE); proteína bruta (CDPB); fibra em detergente neutro (DAFDN); fibra em detergente ácida (CDFDA); celulose (CDCEL) e hemicelulose (CDHCEL) e balanço de nitrogênio. Foi realizado ensaio metabólico com 20 ovinos castrados, peso vivo médio de 24 kg, distribuídos em cinco tratamentos e quatro repetições, em delineamento inteiramente casualizado. Houve período adaptativo de 21 dias, com cinco dias de coleta de dados da dieta fornecida e sobras, fezes e urina. Os CMS, CMO, CEE, CPB, CFDN, CFDA, CHCEL, CLIG apresentaram efeitos quadráticos em função dos níveis de substituição com torta na dieta. Os CDMS; CDMO e CDPB não apresentaram efeitos significativos. Os CDEE, com nível de substituição ótimo de 56,64% e digestibilidade máxima de 88,62%, CDFDN com nível de substituição ótimo de 42,45% e digestibilidade máxima de 68,25%, CDFDA com nível de substituição ótimo de 31,63% e digestibilidade máxima de 66,80%, CDCEL com nível de substituição ótimo de 27,45% e digestibilidade máxima de 72,21% apresentaram efeito quadrático devido à substituição com torta de murumuru. O balanço de nitrogênio não apresentou efeito significativo no intervalo de inclusão de 0% a 60% de torta. Conclui-se que a torta de murumuru (Astrocaryum murumuru var. murumuru, Mart.), tem como principal limitação o baixo consumo alimentar e digestibilidade, além da impossibilidade de sua utilização como concentrado exclusivo na dieta de ovinos mostrando-se como alternativa alimentar em até 20% de substituição em dietas para ovinos.

Estudo de vocábulos para avaliação de crianças com deficiência sem linguagem oral

Researchers in the field of Augmentative and Alternative Communication point out the lack of instruments for assessing children and young people with a complex communication needs. This study's focus is the selection of words for creating an instrument for the vocabulary range in non-speaking children aged two to eleven years and eleven months. Three studies were performed. The first study identified and described tools available for assessing receptive vocabulary and their respective word lists. The second identified and described research that presented word inventories or word lists. The third study identified the vocabulary reported by parents and teachers. The words that were identified in the three studies were analyzed according to: the number of times they occurred; the Picture Communication Symbols system classification; and a semantic and syntactic classification. Based on these studies the following criteria for vocabulary selection were established for word selection: the 45 words which appeared in all three studies, the words that occurred five times or more, considering the three studies, representing 167 (14.14%) words; the words identified in study one or two, but that had been reported by the families - 183 (19.37% out of 945 words) - or by teachers - 108 (11.43% out of 945 words). The word list was composed of 269 items, classified in 18 semantic and syntactic topics; it represents an initial tool for professionals in the field of health and education to set goals for beginning assessment of children and teenagers who are users of Augmentative and Alternative Communication systems.

Caracterização de um latossolo em sistemas agroflorestais e mata com o uso de análise estatística multivariada

Pós-graduação em Agronomia (Ciência do Solo) - FCAV

Flexible feeding kinematics of a tropical carnivorous anuran tadpole

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Substituição parcial do farelo de soja pela farinha de carne e ossos em dietas para juvenis de tilápia-do-nilo

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Uso de sistemas de comunicação suplementar e alternativa na Educação Infantil: percepção do professor

Augmentative and Alternative Communication Resources have proven to be helpful in the insertion of students with disabilities and complex communication needs into a variety of pedagogical activities and expand the skills and competencies of the teacher in the teaching-learning. The objective of this research was to identify the perception of teachers regarding the use of augmentative and alternative communication during an intervention program in Preschool. Participants were a special class of Preschool students with disabilities and severe communication complexity, along with their teacher and the researcher. For the development of this research, a Alternative Communication Program was applied. The teacher was provided with systematic guidance concerning language and communication. In a collaborative process, three children’s songs were selected according to the teacher’s pedagogical planning and adapted resources through Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems. During the intervention program, assisted evaluations also took place immediately after the activities with the music. The data were collected in audio recordings. For data analysis, content analysis was carried out resulting in the outlining of themes and subthemes. Results indicated that the teacher identified that Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems can to facilitate expression abilities of students with disabilities; that Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems can be used by children in Preschool; and that resources adapted through augmentative and alternative communication systems should be in accordance with the specificities of students.

Programa de capacitação de famílias de crianças, jovens e adultos usuários de comunicação alternativa

This study aimed to enter a training program for family members of children, youth and adults who use augmentative and alternative communication systems in the context of alternative languages . The study included families in the age group of 25-65 years in the period 2010- 2012. The activities were held weekly with duration of one hour in a alternative communication laboratory. All activities were videotaped and after that, the verbal participants’ reports were transcribed. The obtained categories were analyzed according to the steps of the program. The results indicated that families realized: the necessity of graphics systems for communication; the importance of adapted materials; and the need to understand their children’s different skills. The study reinforced the need for systematic and continuous guidance for families, as well as highlighted the use of graphics systems in the context of language.

The Genetic Architecture of Climatic Adaptation of Tropical Cattle

Adaptation of global food systems to climate change is essential to feed the world. Tropical cattle production, a mainstay of profitability for farmers in the developing world, is dominated by heat, lack of water, poor quality feedstuffs, parasites, and tropical diseases. In these systems European cattle suffer significant stock loss, and the cross breeding of taurine x indicine cattle is unpredictable due to the dilution of adaptation to heat and tropical diseases. We explored the genetic architecture of ten traits of tropical cattle production using genome wide association studies of 4,662 animals varying from 0% to 100% indicine. We show that nine of the ten have genetic architectures that include genes of major effect, and in one case, a single location that accounted for more than 71% of the genetic variation. One genetic region in particular had effects on parasite resistance, yearling weight, body condition score, coat colour and penile sheath score. This region, extending 20 Mb on BTA5, appeared to be under genetic selection possibly through maintenance of haplotypes by breeders. We found that the amount of genetic variation and the genetic correlations between traits did not depend upon the degree of indicine content in the animals. Climate change is expected to expand some conditions of the tropics to more temperate environments, which may impact negatively on global livestock health and production. Our results point to several important genes that have large effects on adaptation that could be introduced into more temperate cattle without detrimental effects on productivity.

Sistemas suplementares e alternativos de comunicação nas habilidades expressivas de um aluno com paralisia cerebral

The objective of this research was to describe the use of an augmentative and alternative system for a student with cerebral palsy during intervention. A 10-year-old male student with cerebral palsy participated in this investigation. He attended special classes for people with disability in a public school in a city of the interior of Sao Paulo. The scheduled activities were carried out twice a week for two years at the Laboratory of Special Education of a public University of São Paulo. All of the tapes describing the activities that were filmed during the assessment and implementation of augmentative and alternative communication resource were watched and described using a specific protocol. Based on the information from the protocols, the sessions with intervals greater than 20 days and the ones with activities involving the communication board with the time equal or greater than 20 minutes during the first year of intervention were selected. The chosen sessions were transcribed in full and, after analyzing the text, the following categories were established, according to the stated goal: the graphic system helped the student with utterances of vertical structure (56%) associated with the oral (14%) and non-oral and non-verbal form (30%), while the use of the graphic system along with other forms collaborated to enhance statements, enabling better understanding of the child s intention. The use of augmentative and alternative communication systems provided the expansion of effective dialogical situations for the student during the activities carried out in speech therapy.

Desenvolvimento de um sistema de controle para avaliação de fontes de energias renováveis no bombeamento de água

The use of alternative energy systems in the current days is an urgent necessity due to the problems that the planet is facing as the heating and loss of ozone layer. The scarcity of conventional energy is another problem that must be solved for the future of humanity. It must be considered that the people are inhabiting places moved away not always with available energy. The application of technologies as automation and control can help us to solve this problem. Therefore, this work aimed at apply an equipment of industrial usage, the Programmable Logical Controller, PLC, in alternative energies systems, as eolic generation and fotovoltaic generation used for water pumping, aiming the automatic control and the efficiency in the places where it has simultaneous availability of these sources, based in criterion of priority that previously established itself between them. It was made a hydraulic and energetic evaluation of the energy system, eolic and fotovoltaic, used in the automatic control system of pumping, in the place of accomplishment of the experiment, according to previously established physical conditions. The results have shown that the control system using the PLC is practicable and has trustworthiness. The program developed can be adapted for the use with several power plants in a specific application place. The fotovoltaic system of pumping, using a polycrystalline of 70 Watts connected to a pump Shurflo 8000, showed to be efficient with significant flows in almost all the months. The eolic system of pumping, using an eolic generator of 400 Watts assembled in place of experiment, did not demonstrate energetic capacity for use in this specific type of application.

Selenate and selenite on yield and agronomic biofortification with selenium in rice

The objective of this work was to evaluate the effect of doses of selenate and selenite on rice (Oryza sativa) biofortification with Se, as well the influence of these forms of Se in the levels of P, S, Fe, and Zn in grains. The experiment was conducted in a greenhouse, in pots with 4 dm(3) of a sandy clay loam Latosol, with medium texture, in a 5x2 factorial arrangement with five doses of Se (0, 0.75, 1.50, 3.0, and 6.0 mg dm(-3)) and two forms of Se (selenate and selenite). Selenate provided greater efficiency of root uptake of Se, plant-use efficiency, translocation from roots to shoots, and content of this element in rice grains. The application of Se during fertilization influences the levels of P, S, and Zn, but does not affect those of Fe in rice grains.

Isolation and characterization of the flour and starch of plantain bananas (Musa paradisiaca)

Plantain bananas of the variety Terra (Musa paradisiaca) may have industrial value due to their high starch content. In this research, the flour and starch of such unripe fruit were isolated and their chemical, physicochemical, and structural characteristics were determined. Banana flour and starch had a dry basis yield of 50.6 and 28.5%, and an average granule size of 31.7 and 47.3?mu m, respectively. Both raw materials revealed a C-type pattern and high gelatinization temperatures. The peak viscosity was greater for flour (378.0 RVU) than for starch (252.6 RVU), although the final viscosity was lower. At temperatures above 65 degrees C, the swelling power of banana flour was lower than that of starch, while the solubility of flour was greater than that of starch at all temperatures. Furthermore, the presence of other components in banana flour influenced its physicochemical properties. In general, the flour and starch processed from unripe bananas have numerous possible uses as ingredients in food systems and for other industrial purposes.

Use of solvents and environmental friendly materials for applications in Green Chemistry

The present Thesis studies three alternative solvent groups as sustainable replacement of traditional organic solvents. Some aspects of fluorinated solvents, supercritical fluids and ionic liquids, have been analysed with a critical approach and their effective “greenness” has been evaluated from the points of view of the synthesis, the properties and the applications. In particular, the attention has been put on the environmental and human health issues, evaluating the eco-toxicity, the toxicity and the persistence, to underline that applicability and sustainability are subjects with equal importance. The “green” features of fluorous solvents and supercritical fluids are almost well-established; in particular supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) is probably the “greenest” solvent among the alternative solvent systems developed in the last years, enabling to combine numerous advantages both from the point of view of industrial/technological applications and eco-compatibility. In the Thesis the analysis of these two classes of alternative solvents has been mainly focused on their applicability, rather than the evaluation of their environmental impact. Specifically they have been evaluated as alternative media for non-aqueous biocatalysis. For this purpose, the hydrophobic ion pairing (HIP), which allows solubilising enzymes in apolar solvents by an ion pairing between the protein and a surfactant, has been investigated as effective enzymatic derivatisation technique to improve the catalytic activity under homogeneous conditions in non conventional media. The results showed that the complex enzyme-surfactant was much more active both in fluorous solvents and in supercritical carbon dioxide than the native form of the enzyme. Ionic liquids, especially imidazolium salts, have been proposed some years ago as “fully green” alternative solvents; however this epithet does not take into account several “brown” aspects such as their synthesis from petro-chemical starting materials, their considerable eco-toxicity, toxicity and resistance to biodegradation, and the difficulty of clearly outline applications in which ionic liquids are really more advantageous than traditional solvents. For all of these reasons in this Thesis a critical analysis of ionic liquids has been focused on three main topics: i) alternative synthesis by introducing structural moieties which could reduce the toxicity of the most known liquid salts, and by using starting materials from renewable resources; ii) on the evaluation of their environmental impact through eco-toxicological tests (Daphnia magna and Vibrio fischeri acute toxicity tests, and algal growth inhibition), toxicity tests (MTT test, AChE inhibition and LDH release tests) and fate and rate of aerobic biodegradation in soil and water; iii) and on the demonstration of their effectiveness as reaction media in organo-catalysis and as extractive solvents in the recovery of vegetable oil from terrestrial and aquatic biomass. The results about eco-toxicity tests with Daphnia magna, Vibrio fischeri and algae, and toxicity assay using cultured cell lines, clearly indicate that the difference in toxicity between alkyl and oxygenated cations relies in differences of polarity, according to the general trend of decreasing toxicity by decreasing the lipophilicity. Independently by the biological approach in fact, all the results are in agreement, showing a lower toxicity for compounds with oxygenated lateral chains than for those having purely alkyl lateral chains. These findings indicate that an appropriate choice of cation and anion structures is important not only to design the IL with improved and suitable chemico-physical properties but also to obtain safer and eco-friendly ILs. Moreover there is a clear indication that the composition of the abiotic environment has to be taken into account when the toxicity of ILs in various biological test systems is analysed, because, for example, the data reported in the Thesis indicate a significant influence of salinity variations on algal toxicity. Aerobic biodegradation of four imidazolium ionic liquids, two alkylated and two oxygenated, in soil was evaluated for the first time. Alkyl ionic liquids were shown to be biodegradable over the 6 months test period, and in contrast no significant mineralisation was observed with oxygenated derivatives. A different result was observed in the aerobic biodegradation of alkylated and oxygenated pyridinium ionic liquids in water because all the ionic liquids were almost completely degraded after 10 days, independently by the number of oxygen in the lateral chain of the cation. The synthesis of new ionic liquids by using renewable feedstock as starting materials, has been developed through the synthesis of furan-based ion pairs from furfural. The new ammonium salts were synthesised in very good yields, good purity of the products and wide versatility, combining low melting points with high decomposition temperatures and reduced viscosities. Regarding the possible applications as surfactants and biocides, furan-based salts could be a valuable alternative to benzyltributylammonium salts and benzalkonium chloride that are produced from non-renewable resources. A new procedure for the allylation of ketones and aldehydes with tetraallyltin in ionic liquids was developed. The reaction afforded high yields both in sulfonate-containing ILs and in ILs without sulfonate upon addition of a small amount of sulfonic acid. The checked reaction resulted in peculiar chemoselectivity favouring aliphatic substrates towards aromatic ketones and good stereoselectivity in the allylation of levoglucosenone. Finally ILs-based systems could be easily and successfully recycled, making the described procedure environmentally benign. The potential role of switchable polarity solvents as a green technology for the extraction of vegetable oil from terrestrial and aquatic biomass has been investigated. The extraction efficiency of terrestrial biomass rich in triacylglycerols, as soy bean flakes and sunflower seeds, was comparable to those of traditional organic solvents, being the yield of vegetable oils recovery very similar. Switchable polarity solvents as been also exploited for the first time in the extraction of hydrocarbons from the microalga Botryococcus braunii, demonstrating the efficiency of the process for the extraction of both dried microalgal biomass and directly of the aqueous growth medium. The switchable polarity solvents exhibited better extraction efficiency than conventional solvents, both with dried and liquid samples. This is an important issue considering that the harvest and the dewatering of algal biomass have a large impact on overall costs and energy balance.

Fattori relazionali e di coordinamento nella filiera agro-alimentare: una valutazione della governance relazionale nel settore lattiero caseario sardo

Characteristics of modern food demand force retailers to acquire more information about product process along the food supply chain to ensure that product are in accordance with consumer preference. Therefore, the product process involves more information flows between buyer and supplier which requires collaborative efforts. These changes translate into several studies on the inter-organizational relationship in agri-food systems. Studies on inter-organizational relationships have been conducted in various academic disciplines, including sociology, psychology, law, economics, marketing, management, and combination of these. Inter-organizational relationships is an interaction between organizations which involved firms horizontally, as well as, vertically. In this study we deal with vertical, buyer-seller relationship which are sometimes referred to chain relationships. We define vertical business relationship in the agriculture-food based sector as “agri-food chain relationships”. The focus is on sustainable inter-organizational relationships in a way that they can be scientifically investigated. We study characteristics which ensure that a relationship is long-lasting and rewarding for all involved parties in the sardinian dairy. We test the theoretical model using structural equation modeling. The results suggest that the most important determinant for the relationships is technology and the price isn’t significant for the relationship governance.

Farming and processing stategies for improving poultry meat quality

The purpose of the PhD research was the identification of new strategies of farming and processing, with the aim to improve the nutritional and technological characteristics of poultry meat. Part of the PhD research was focused on evaluation of alternative farming systems, with the aim to increase animal welfare and to improve the meat quality and sensorial characteristics in broiler chickens. It was also assessed the use of innovative ingredients for marination of poultry meat (sodium bicarbonate and natural antioxidants) The research was developed by studying the following aspects: - Meat quality characteristics, oxidative stability and sensorial traits of chicken meat obtained from two different farming systems: free range vs conventional; - Meat quality traits of frozen chicken breast pre-salted using increasing concentrations of sodium chloride; - Use of sodium bicarbonate in comparison with sodium trypolyphosphate for marination of broiler breast meat and phase; - Marination with thyme and orange essential oils mixture to improve chicken meat quality traits, susceptibility to lipid oxidation and sensory traits. The following meat quality traits analyseswere performed: Colour, pH, water holding capacity by conventional (gravimetric methods, pressure application, centrifugation and cooking) and innovative methods (low-field NMR and DSC analysis) ability to absorb marinade soloutions, texture (shear force using different probes and texture profile analysis), proximate analysis (moisture, proteins, lipids, ash content, collagen, fatty acid), susceptibility to lipid oxidation (determinations of reactive substances with thiobarbituric acid and peroxide value), sensorial analysis (triangle test and consumer test).