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Chitosan has several biological properties useful for the food industry, but the most attractive is its potential use as a food preservative of natural origin due to its antimicrobial activity against a wide range of food-borne microorganisms. Among food-borne pathogens, Campylobacter jejuni and related species are recognised as the most common causes of bacterial food-borne diarrhoeal disease throughout the world. Recently, it has been demonstrated that campylobacters are highly sensitive to chitosan. Even though chitosan is known to have important functional activities, poor solubility makes them difficult to use in food and biomedical applications. Unlike chitosan, the low viscosity and good solubility of chitosan oligosaccharides (COS) make them especially attractive in an important number of useful applications. In the present work, the effect of different COS on C. jejuni was investigated. Variables such as the physicochemical characteristics of chitosan and the enzyme used in COS preparation were studied. The COS had been fractioned using ultrafiltration membranes and each fraction was characterized regarding its FA and molecular weight distribution. It has been demonstrated that the biological properties of COS on Campylobacter depend on the composition of the fraction analysed. COS prepared by enzymatic hydrolysis with chitosanase were more active against Campylobacter that lysozyme-derived COS, and this behaviour seems to be related with the acetylation of the chains. On the other hand. the 10-30 kDa fraction was the most active COS fraction, independently of the enzyme used for the hydrolysis. These results have shown that COS could be useful as antimicrobial in the control of C. jejuni.
Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has had a major breakthrough with the impressive results obtained using systems of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has a huge potential in astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology. CTA is an international initiative to build the next generation instrument, with a factor of 5-10 improvement in sensitivity in the 100 GeV-10 TeV range and the extension to energies well below 100 GeV and above 100 TeV. CTA will consist of two arrays (one in the north, one in the south) for full sky coverage and will be operated as open observatory. The design of CTA is based on currently available technology. This document reports on the status and presents the major design concepts of CTA.
The chemical composition of eclogites, found as boulders in a Tertiary conglomerate from the Guajira Peninsula, Colombia suggests that these rocks are mainly metamorphosed basaltic andesites. They are depleted in LILE elements compared to MORB, have a negative Nb-anomaly and flat to enriched REE patterns, suggesting that their protoliths evolved in a subduction related tectonic setting. They show island-arc affinities and are similar to primitive island-arc rocks described in the Caribbean. The geochemical characteristics are comparable to low-grade greenschists from the nearby Etpana Terrane, which are interpreted as part of a Cretaceous intra-oceanic arc. These data support evidence that the eclogites and the Etpana terrane rocks formed from the same volcano-sedimentary sequence. Part of this sequence was accreted onto the margin and another was incorporated into the subduction channel and metamorphosed at eclogite facies conditions. Ar-40-Ar-39 ages of 79.2 +/- 1.1Ma and 82.2 +/- 2.5Ma determined on white micas, separated from two eclogite samples, are interpreted to be related to the cooling of the main metamorphic event. The formation of a common volcano-sedimentary protolith and subsequent metamorphism of these units record the ongoing Late Cretaceous continental subduction of the South American margin within the Caribbean intra-oceanic arc subduction zone. This gave way to an arc-continent collision between the Caribbean and the South American plates, where this sequence was exhumed after the Campanian.
We report on the gamma-ray activity of the blazar Mrk 501 during the first 480 days of Fermi operation. We find that the average Large Area Telescope (LAT) gamma-ray spectrum of Mrk 501 can be well described by a single power-law function with a photon index of 1.78 +/- 0.03. While we observe relatively mild flux variations with the Fermi-LAT (within less than a factor of two), we detect remarkable spectral variability where the hardest observed spectral index within the LAT energy range is 1.52 +/- 0.14, and the softest one is 2.51 +/- 0.20. These unexpected spectral changes do not correlate with the measured flux variations above 0.3 GeV. In this paper, we also present the first results from the 4.5 month long multifrequency campaign (2009 March 15-August 1) on Mrk 501, which included the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), Swift, RXTE, MAGIC, and VERITAS, the F-GAMMA, GASP-WEBT, and other collaborations and instruments which provided excellent temporal and energy coverage of the source throughout the entire campaign. The extensive radio to TeV data set from this campaign provides us with the most detailed spectral energy distribution yet collected for this source during its relatively low activity. The average spectral energy distribution of Mrk 501 is well described by the standard one-zone synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model. In the framework of this model, we find that the dominant emission region is characterized by a size less than or similar to 0.1 pc (comparable within a factor of few to the size of the partially resolved VLBA core at 15-43 GHz), and that the total jet power (similar or equal to 10(44) erg s(-1)) constitutes only a small fraction (similar to 10(-3)) of the Eddington luminosity. The energy distribution of the freshly accelerated radiating electrons required to fit the time-averaged data has a broken power-law form in the energy range 0.3 GeV-10 TeV, with spectral indices 2.2 and 2.7 below and above the break energy of 20 GeV. We argue that such a form is consistent with a scenario in which the bulk of the energy dissipation within the dominant emission zone of Mrk 501 is due to relativistic, proton-mediated shocks. We find that the ultrarelativistic electrons and mildly relativistic protons within the blazar zone, if comparable in number, are in approximate energy equipartition, with their energy dominating the jet magnetic field energy by about two orders of magnitude.