The conventional powder flow testers require sample volumes larger than 40g and are met with experimental hiccups due to powder cohesion. This study designed a gas-pressurized dispersive powder flow tester where a high velocity air is used to disaggregate powder (9g) and eliminate its cohesion. The pressurized gas entrained solid particles leaving an orifice where the distance, surface area, width and weight of particle dispersion thereafter are determined as flow index. The flow indices of seven lactose grades with varying size, size distribution, shape, morphology, bulk and tapped densities characteristics were examined. They were compared against Hausner ratio and Carr's index parameters of the same powder mass. Both distance and surface area attributes of particle dispersion had significant negative correlations with Hausner ratio and Carr's index values of lactose. The distance, surface area and ease of particle dispersion varied proportionately with circular equivalent, surface weighted mean and volume weighted mean diameters of lactose, and inversely related to their specific surface area and elongation characteristics. Unlike insensitive Hausner ratio and Carr's index, an increase in elongation property of lactose particles was detectable through reduced powder weight loss from gas-pressurized dispersion as a result of susceptible particle blockage at orifice. The gas-pressurized dispersive tester is a useful alternative flowability measurement device for low volume and cohesive powder.
This study developed a tester where the powder flow was characterized using a low sample mass (2 g) and impact instead of dispersion mechanism to mitigate test space constraint. An impact chamber was established where the test powder bed of seven lactose grades was weight-impacted to produce impact crater and ejecta, and imaged quantitatively to determine crater profiling signature (crater depth), regional topography (ejecta roughness), Otsu threshold (bed continuity) and edge segmentation (bed deformation). The Hausner ratio (HR) and Carr's index (CI) values of lactose, and their powder dispersion distance and surface area characteristics evaluated by gas-pressurized dispersibility test were examined as reference method. The crater signature profiling and regional topography were correlated to HR, CI, dispersive distance and surface area. A poorer powder flow was characterized by higher values of crater signature profiling, regional topography, HR, CI, and lower dispersive distance and surface area. The crater signature profiling and regional topography values were higher with smaller and rougher lactose particles that were cohesive. The powder impact flow is a viable non-dispersive approach to characterize powder flowability using a small sample mass and test space.
Probiotics are live microorganisms that can be found in fermented foods and cultured milk, and are widely used for the preparation of infant food. They are well-known as "health friendly bacteria", which exhibit various health beneficial properties such as prevention of bowel diseases, improving the immune system, for lactose intolerance and intestinal microbial balance, exhibiting antihypercholesterolemic and antihypertensive effects, alleviation of postmenopausal disorders, and reducing traveller's diarrhoea. Recent studies have also been focused on their uses in treating skin and oral diseases. In addition to that, modulation of the gut-brain by probiotics has been suggested as a novel therapeutic solution for anxiety and depression. Thus, this review discusses on the current probiotics-based products in Malaysia, criteria for selection of probiotics, and evidences obtained from past studies on how probiotics have been used in preventing intestinal disorders via improving the immune system, acting as an antihypercholesterolemic factor, improving oral and dermal health, and performing as anti-anxiety and anti-depressive agents.
In the attempt to create a delivery system for an alkali-cation stimulated drug release, a computational study was conducted, aiming for the evaluation of synthetic access towards glycolipid crown ethers analogs and their potential for coordination-induced changes of packing constraints for molecular assemblies. The results disfavor amide-linkages for the creation of macrocycles around the inter-glycosidic bond of a disaccharide. Conformational changes upon cation coordination of the macrocycle decrease the intersection area for easily accessible macrocycles based on lactose. This leads to shrinking intersection areas upon alkali complexation. Maltose-based analogs, on the other hand, exhibited the targeted increase of the glycolipid intersection area and, hence, may be considered as a promising resource.
The nanoenvironment of nanobiocatalysts, such as local hydrophobicity, pH and charge density, plays a significant role in optimizing the enzymatic selectivity and specificity. In this study, Kluyveromyces lactis β-galactosidase (Gal) was assembled onto polystyrene nanofibers (PSNFs) to form PSNF-Gal nanobiocatalysts. We proposed that local hydrophobicity on the nanofiber surface could expel water molecules so that the transgalactosylation would be preferable over hydrolysis during the bioconversion of lactose, thus improve the galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) yield. PSNFs were fabricated by electro-spinning and the operational parameters were optimized to obtain the nanofibers with uniform size and ordered alignment. The resulting nanofibers were functionalized for enzyme immobilization through a chemical oxidation method. The functionalized PSNF improved the enzyme adsorption capacity up to 3100mg/g nanofiber as well as enhanced the enzyme stability with 80% of its original activity. Importantly, the functionalized PSNF-Gal significantly improved the GOS yield and the production rate was up to 110g/l/h in comparison with 37g/l/h by free β-galactosidase. Our research findings demonstrate that the localized nanoenvironment of the PSNF-Gal nanobiocatalysts favour transgalactosylation over hydrolysis in lactose bioconversion.
Functional nanomaterials have been pursued to assemble nanobiocatalysts since they can provide unique hierarchical nanostructures and localized nanoenvironments for enhancing enzyme specificity, stability and selectivity. Functionalized dendrimer-like hierarchically porous silica nanoparticles (HPSNs) was fabricated for assembling β-galactosidase nanobiocatalysts for bioconversion of lactose to galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS). The nanocarrier was functionalized with amino (NH2) and carboxyl (COOH) groups to facilitate enzyme binding, benchmarking with non-functionalized HPSNs. Successful conjugation of the functional groups was confirmed by FTIR, TGA and zeta potential analysis. HPSNs-NH2 showed 1.8-fold and 1.1-fold higher β-galactosidase adsorption than HPSNs-COOH and HPSNs carriers, respectively, with the highest enzyme adsorption capacity of 328mg/g nanocarrier at an initial enzyme concentration of 8mg/ml. The HPSNs-NH2 and β-galactosidase assembly (HPSNs-NH2-Gal) demonstrated to maintain the highest activity at all tested enzyme concentrations and exhibited activity up to 10 continuous cycles. Importantly, HPSNs-NH2-Gal was simply recycled through centrifugation, overcoming the challenging problems of separating the nanocarrier from the reaction medium. HPSNs-NH2-Gal had distinguished catalytic reaction profiles by favoring transgalactosylation, enhancing GOS production of up to 122g/l in comparison with 56g/l by free β-galactosidase. Furthermore, it generated up to 46g/l GOS at a lower initial lactose concentration while the free counterpart had negligible GOS production as hydrolysis was overwhelmingly dominant in the reaction system. Our research findings show the amino-functionalized HPSNs can selectively promote the enzyme activity of β-galactosidase for transgalactosylation, which is beneficial for GOS production.