Plovdiv University "Paisii Hilendarski"

The study was carried out between 24-27.02.2023, East and South-East of Karon village on Phuket Island, Thailand. At least 13 species from seven families of Psocoptera were collected. Eleven species were new records for Thailand.

Allelopathic interactions are widespread in all aquatic habitats, among all groups of aquatic primary biomass producers, including cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria are producers of potent toxins called cyanotoxins, whose biological and ecological roles, including their allelopathic influence, are still incompletely understood. The allelopathic potential of the cyanotoxins microcystin-LR (MC-LR) and cylindrospermopsin (CYL) on green algae (Chlamydomonas asymmetrica, Dunaliella salina, and Scenedesmus obtusiusculus) was established. Time-dependent inhibitory effects on the growth and motility of the green algae exposed to cyanotoxins were detected. Changes in their morphology (cell shape, granulation of the cytoplasm, and loss of flagella) were also observed. The cyanotoxins MC-LR and CYL were found to affect photosynthesis to varying degrees in the green algae Chlamydomonas asymmetrica, Dunaliella salina, and Scenedesmus obtusiusculus, affecting chlorophyll fluorescence parameters such as the maximum photochemical activity (Fv/Fm) of photosystem II (PSII), the non-photochemical quenching of chlorophyll fluorescence (NPQ), and the quantum yield of the unregulated energy dissipation Y(NO) in PSII. In the context of ongoing climate change and the associated expectations of the increased frequency of cyanobacterial blooms and released cyanotoxins, our results demonstrated the possible allelopathic role of cyanotoxins on competing autotrophs in the phytoplankton communities.

Citation: Dushkova, M.; Ivanova, M.; Trublet, L.; Petkova, Z.; Teneva, O.; Miteva-Petrova, M.; Desseva, I.; Mihaylova, D. Flux Behaviour, Rejection and Concentration Factors, and Energy Demand during Ultrafiltration of Sweet Buttermilk. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 3804. https:// Abstract: This work aimed to study the flux behavior, rejection and concentration factors, and energy demand to establish the optimal conditions during ultrafiltration of sweet buttermilk to produce ice cream. The experiments were conducted with a UF25-PAN membrane at a transmembrane pressure of 0.2, 0.35 and 0.5 MPa, and a volume reduction ratio (VRR) of 2, 3, 4, and 5. Total protein, fat, ash, and dry matter contents, phospholipid composition, and acidity of retentates and permeate were determined. The increase in the VRR led to a decrease in the permeate flux and an increase in the energy demand, rejection, and concentration factors of the main components of sweet buttermilk. The highest values of rejection and concentration factors established for fat were 98.65% and 4.93, respectively. The permeate flux and energy demand increased with the rise in the transmembrane pressure. The total phospholipids increased 2.8 times at VRR 5 compared to the initial buttermilk. The use of VRR 3 gave the best ratio between the permeate flux, the energy demand, and relatively high values of concentration and rejection factors. The use of VRR 5 will enrich the ice cream to the greatest extent to obtain a product with the highest level of biologically active substances (proteins, phospholipids, minerals).

The 21 st century has seen the realization that people have overused plastic. Unfortunately, plastic pollution is a widespread environmental problem in many of the world's rivers and seas. Plastic litter is well distributed in shallow as well as in deep-waters, and therefore it is inevitably present in the world's ocean which is in turn the final sink of plastic debris of all sizes, alongside other various anthropogenic toxicants (for example, heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants). The negative effects of microplastics (MPs) which are produced by the breakdown of larger plastic debris on aquatic organisms, including both freshwater and marine fish have been already well documented. However, there is a gap in the knowledge from studies conducted in the field or under laboratory conditions in Bulgaria.

New 2-(2,4-dihydroxyphenyl)benzimidazolines are synthesized in an easily accessible approach. The method is based on the reaction of resorcinol with in situ-formed electrophilic N-ethoxycarbonylbenzimidazolium reagents. The structure of the two newly formed products was spectrally characterized by 1D and 2D NMR, IR, and MS spectral analyses. Citation: Stremski, Y.; Bachvarova, M.; Kirkova, D.; Statkova-Abeghe, S. New 2-(2,4-Dihydroxyphenyl) benzimidazolines. Molbank 2023, 2023, M1602. https://doi.10.3390/M1602

Biologically active peptides (BAP) are increasingly in the focus of scientific research due to their widespread use in medicine, food and pharmaceutical industries. Researching and studying the properties of peptides is a laborious and expensive process. In recent years, in silico methods, including data mining or artificial intelligence, have been applied more and more to reveal biological, physicochemical and sensory properties of peptides. This significantly shortens the process of peptide sequences analysis. This article presents a software tool that uses a data mining approach to discover a number of physicochemical properties of a specific peptide. Working with it is extremely simple-it is only necessary to input the amino acid sequence of the peptide of interest. The software tool is designed to generate data in order to increase the classification and prediction accuracy, as well as to leverage the engineering of new amino acid sequences. This way, the proposed software greatly facilitates the work or scientific researchers. The software application is publicly available at www.pep-lab.info/dmpep.

The possible use of chitosan coating on fresh-cut melons (Cucumis melo var. Cantalupensis) was investigated in this research topic. Manually sliced melons were treated with solutions of 10 g/kg chitosan and 10 g/kg chitosan with calcium lactate and then stored at 4°C for 8 days. Physical, physicochemical, microbiological and sensory properties of the samples were monitored during the storage period. It was found that chitosan coatings inhibited the growth of microorganisms and affected significantly and positively the storage time of the products. Changes in the sensory qualities of taste were evaluated. A chitosan coating retarded water loss and the drop in sensory quality, increasing the soluble solid content and titratable acidity. The data revealed that applying a chitosan coating preserved effectively the quality and extended the shelf life of fresh-cut melons.

Four azo dyes known to form anionic complexes with V(V) were investigated as potential liquid-liquid extraction-spectrophotometric reagents for the antihistamine medication hydroxyzine hydrochloride (HZH). A stable ion-association complex suitable for analytical purposes was obtained with 6-hexyl-4-(2-thiazolylazo)resorcinol (HTAR). The molar absorption coefficient, limit of detection, linear working range, and relative standard deviation in the analysis of real pharmaceutical samples (tablets and syrup) were 3.50 × 104 L mol-1 cm-1, 0.13 μg mL-1, 0.43-12.2 μg mL-1, and ≤2.7%, respectively. After elucidating the molar ratio in the extracted ion-association complex (HZH:V = 1:1), the ground-state equilibrium geometries of the two constituent ions-HZH+ and [VO2(HTAR)]--were optimized at the B3LYP level of theory using 6-311++G** basis functions. The cation and anion were then paired in four different ways to find the most likely structure of the extracted species. In the lowest-energy structure, the VO2 group interacts predominantly with the heterochain of the cation. A hydrogen bond is present (V-O···H-O; 1.714 Å) involving the terminal oxygen of this chain.

This study examined the effect of lactulose, galactooligosaccharide, fructooligosaccharide, inulin, and β-glucan on the probiotic strain Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus L14, cultivated in an in vitro gastrointestinal system model. We analyzed the degree of hydrolysis of the studied prebiotic oligosaccharides in condition of simulated gastric fluid. The results showed that lactulose had the highest resistance, galactooligosaccharide underwent hydrolysis, and fructooligosaccharide was the most sensitive. Among the polysaccharides, fructose was released from inulin and glucose from β-glucan. Short-chain oligosaccharides and metabolites derived from studied prebiotic oligosaccharides and polysaccharides, supported the growth of probiotic strain L14, which showed the highest growth with fructooligosaccharides and β-glucan as carbohydrate sources. The profile of the activated enzymes secreted by the probiotic strain L14, indicated their inducible character. Beta-galactosidase was activated in the presence of lactulose and GalOS, inulinase was activated in the presence of inulin and fructooligosaccharides, and β-glucosidase was activated in the presence of β-glucan fragments. Analysis of the produced organic and short-chain fatty acids showed that the typical representative of the homofermentative lactobacilli Lb. delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus L14 changes its metabolism from a homofermentative to a heterofermentative type, best expressed in the presence of lactulose, galactooligosaccharide, and β-glucan.

Boundary value problems are very applicable problems for different types of differential equations and stability of solutions, which are an important qualitative question in the theory of differential equations. There are various types of stability, one of which is the so called Ulam-type stability, and it is a special type of data dependence of solutions of differential equations. For boundary value problems, this type of stability requires some additional understanding, and, in connection with this, we discuss the Ulam-Hyers stability for different types of differential equations, such as ordinary differential equations and generalized proportional Caputo fractional differential equations. To propose an appropriate idea of Ulam-type stability, we consider a boundary condition with a parameter, and the value of the parameter depends on the chosen arbitrary solution of the corresponding differential inequality. Several examples are given to illustrate the theoretical considerations.

Invasive species as sources of natural components are of increasing interest for scientific research. This is the case of Ailanthus altissima, which belongs to the top 100 of the most dangerous invasive plant species in Europe, and which is the subject of the present study. The purpose of the research was to analyze the main phenolic compounds in the flowers, leaves, and stem bark of A. altissima and determine the DNA-protective and antioxidant potential of their ethanolic extracts. HPLC profiling revealed the presence of 6 flavonoids and 10 phenolic acids, of which 15 were found in flowers, 14 in leaves, and 11 in the stem bark. Rutin (5.68 mg/g dw in flowers), hesperidin (2.67 mg/g dw in leaves) and (+)-catechin (2.15 mg/g dw in stem bark) were the best-represented flavonoids. Rosmarinic (10.32 mg/g dw in leaves) and salicylic (6.19 mg/g dw in leaves) acids were predominant among phenolic acids. All plant extracts tested showed in vitro antioxidant activity (determined by DPPH, ABTS, FRAP, and CUPRAC assays) and DNA-protection capacity (assay with supercoiled plasmid DNA—pUC19). The highest antioxidant activity was recorded in the flower parts (in the range from 661 to 893 mmol TE/g dw), followed by the leaves. A DNA protective potential for A. altissima leaf and flower extracts has not been established to date. In addition, the main microscopic diagnostic features of studied plant substances were described, with data for the flower parts being reported for the first time. The present study proves that A. altissima could be a natural source of DNA protection and antioxidants.

We report a detailed study on the magnetic behaviors and magnetocaloric (MC) effect of a single crystal of lithium samarium tetraphosphate, LiSm(PO3)4. The analyses of temperature-dependent magnetization data have revealed magnetic ordering established with decreasing temperature below T p, where T p is the minimum of a dM/dT vs. T curve and varies as a linear function of the applied field H. The Curie temperature has been extrapolated from T p(H) data, as H → 0, to be about 0.51 K. The establishment of magnetic-ordering causes a substantial change in the heat capacity C p. Above T p, the crystal exhibits paramagnetic behavior. Using the Curie-Weiss (CW) law and Arrott plots, we have found the crystal to have a CW temperature θ CW ≈ -36 K, and short-range magnetic order associated with a coexistence of antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic interactions ascribed to the couplings of magnetic dipoles and octupoles at the Γ7 and Γ8 states. An assessment of the MC effect has shown increases in value of the absolute magnetic-entropy change (|ΔS m|) and adiabatic-temperature change (ΔT ad) when lowering the temperature to 2 K, and increasing the magnetic-field H magnitude. Around 2 K, the maximum value of |ΔS m| is about 3.6 J kg-1 K-1 for the field H = 50 kOe, and ΔT ad is about 5.8 K for H = 20 kOe, with the relative cooling power (RCP) of ∼82.5 J kg-1. In spite of a low MC effect in comparison to Li(Gd,Tb,Ho)(PO3)4, the absence of magnetic hysteresis reflects that LiSm(PO3)4 is also a candidate for low-temperature MC applications below 25 K.

In this paper, we provide a detailed local convergence analysis of a one-parameter family of iteration methods for the simultaneous approximation of polynomial zeros due to Ivanov (Numer. Algor. 75(4): 1193–1204, 2017). Thus, we obtain two local convergence theorems that provide sufficient conditions to guarantee the Q-cubic convergence of all members of the family. Among the other contributions, our results unify the latest such kind of results of the well known Dochev–Byrnev and Ehrlich methods. Several practical applications are further given to emphasize the advantages of the studied family of methods and to show the applicability of the theoretical results.

The purpose of the publication is to present a web page validation approach that is part of a method for designing accessible web content. The validation approach is built on standards, principles, guidelines, success criteria and techniques for web content validation. The main standards to which the approach adheres are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Technical Specifications for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. The publication discusses the understanding of dynamic web content, dynamic web content design and implementation method and web content validation approach.

new collection of Psocoptera from Uganda revealed 37 species. Thirty six were new records for the country. After this study the current list of barklice of Uganda is comprised of 50 species.

In this article, proposals for the realization of an infrastructural re-think on the way authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) services and charging and billing (C&B) services are supplied within the ubiquitous consumer wireless world (UCWW) are set out. Proposals envisage these services being owned and organized by trusted third parties (TTPs) and utilizing new globally standardized protocols and infrastructural entity interfaces. Their implementation will affect a successful realization of the UCWW’s consumer-based techno-business infrastructure, complementing or even replacing the present legacy network-centric, subscriber-based one. The approach enables a loose dynamic, or even casual, consumer-type association between consumers (mobile users) and network/teleservice providers, and it opens the door to multifaceted benefits for consumers, for new network/teleservice providers, and for other new UCWW business entities in addition to the 3P-AAA and 3P-C&B service providers at the heart of this article’s proposals.

3-(1-Ethylamino-ethylidene)-1-methyl-pyrrolidine-2,4-dione was obtained as an unexpected product in a three-step synthesis starting with o-nitrobenzoyl sarcosine, acetoacetanilide and ethylamine. The compound showed moderate antibacterial activity against S. aureus and E. coli.

Citation: Zhelev, Z.; Mollov, I.; Tsonev, S. Application of Fluctuating Asymmetry Values in Pelophylax ridibundus (Amphibia: Anura: Ranidae) Meristic Traits as a Method for Assessing Environmental Quality of Areas with Different Degrees of Urbanization. Diversity 2023, 15, 118. Abstract: In this paper, we assess the environmental impact of urbanization in three freshwater biotopes, using the levels of fluctuating asymmetry (FA) in 10 meristic morphological traits in the Marsh Frog (Pelophylax ridibundus (Pallas, 1771)). Two of the studied biotopes are located in the boundaries of the city of Plovdiv (one in the central part, the other in a suburban residential area), and the third is located in the vicinity of the village of Orizare. Our working hypothesis is based on the assumption that urban and suburban sites are more severely affected by human activities than rural sites. However, according to our results, the population of P. ridibundus inhabiting Maritsa River in the central part of Plovdiv City, and that in the suburban zone, have found relatively good living conditions. Contrary to our expectations, the worst environmental conditions were observed in the rural zone, where anthropogenic stress related to intensive pastoral animal husbandry and crop farming was present. The absence of adult individuals in the rural site is also an indicator of unfavorable living conditions.

In this paper, a delayed reaction-diffusion neural network model of fractional order and with several constant delays is considered. Generalized proportional Caputo fractional derivatives with respect to the time variable are applied, and this type of derivative generalizes several known types in the literature for fractional derivatives such as the Caputo fractional derivative. Thus, the obtained results additionally generalize some known models in the literature. The long term behavior of the solution of the model when the time is increasing without a bound is studied and sufficient conditions for approaching zero are obtained. Lyapunov functions defined as a sum of squares with their generalized proportional Caputo fractional derivatives are applied and a comparison result for a scalar linear generalized proportional Caputo fractional differential equation with several constant delays is presented. Lyapunov functions and the comparison principle are then combined to establish our main results.

We have investigated the hydrogen-annealing influence on the crystalline and electronic structures, and magnetic properties of La2/3Ca1/3MnO3 (LCMO). The results have indicated that the annealing at 700 and 900°C (labeled as LCMO-700 and LCMO-900, respectively) readily reduced single-phase LCMO, resulting in a complex phase composition of several isostructural oxygen-deficient perovskite-type phases coexisting with the Ruddlesden-Popper (La/Ca)2MnO4-type phase. While a Mn³⁺/Mn⁴⁺ mixed valence is present in LCMO, the hydrogen-annealed samples mainly have Mn²⁺ and Mn³⁺ ions. Under such circumstance, large changes in magnetic parameters have been recorded, such as remarkable decreases in values of the magnetization, the Curie temperature (from 251 K for the as-prepared LCMO through 240 K for LCMO-700 to ∼221 K for LCMO-900), and the magnetic-entropy change. Particularly, the crystal and electronic-structure changes also enhance the magnetic inhomogeneity, resulting in a strong development of the Griffiths phase, and cause the first-to-second-order phase transformation. These results reflect the instability of the LCMO perovskite-type manganite versus hydrogenation. Fig. 3 K-edge XAS spectra of the fabricated samples compared with those of manganese oxides as references. The arrow shows the absorption-edge (Abs. edge) shift of Mn. Fullsize Image