In the last decade, there has been an increase in the use of sprouted grains in human diet and a parallel increase in the scientific literature dealing with their nutritional traits and phytochemical contents. This review examines the physiological and biochemical changes during the germination process, and the effects on final sprout composition in terms of macro- and micro-nutrients and bioactive compounds. The main factors affecting sprout composition are taken into consideration: genotype, environmental conditions experimented by the mother plant, germination conditions. In particular, the review deepens the recent knowledge on the possible elicitation factors useful for increasing the phytochemical contents. Microbiological risks and post-harvest technologies are also evaluated, and a brief summary is given of some important in vivo studies matching with the use of grain sprouts in the diet. All the species belonging to Poaceae (Gramineae) family as well as pseudocereals species are included.

Seed priming is a pre-sowing treatment which leads to a physiological state that enables seed to germinate more efficiently. The majority of seed treatments are based on seed imbibition allowing the seeds to go through the first reversible stage of germination but do not allow radical protrusion through the seed coat. Seeds keeping their desiccation tolerance are then dehydrated and can be stored until final sowing. During subsequent germination, primed seeds exhibit a faster and more synchronized germination and young seedlings are often more vigorous and resistant to abiotic stresses than seedlings obtained from unprimed seeds. Priming often involves soaking seed in predetermined amounts of water or limitation of the imbibition time. The imbibition rate could be somehow controlled by osmotic agents such as PEG and referred as osmopriming. Halopriming implies the use of specific salts while "hormopriming" relies on the use of plant growth regulators. Some physical treatments UV, cold or heat,.. also provide germination improvement thus suggesting that priming effects are not necessarily related to seed imbibition. " better understanding of the metabolic events taking place during the priming treatment and the subsequent germination should help to use this simple and cheap technology in a more efficient way.

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Our evidence suggests that the grains of einkorn and emmer and the sprouts and wheatgrass of all Triticum species might potentially be valuable for the development of functional foods.

Selenium (Se) is an important micronutrient for living organisms, since it is involved in several physiological and metabolic processes. Se intake in humans is often low and very seldom excessive, and its bioavailability depends also on its chemical form, with organic Se as the most available after ingestion. The main dietary source of Se for humans is represented by plants, since many species are able to metabolize and accumulate organic Se in edible parts to be consumed directly (leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, and sprouts) or after processing (oil, wine, etc.). Countless studies have recently investigated the Se biofortification of plants to produce Se-enriched foods and elicit the production of secondary metabolites, which may benefit human health when incorporated into the diet. Moreover, feeding animals Se-rich diets may provide Se-enriched meat. This work reviews the most recent literature on the nutraceutical profile of Se-enriched foods from plant and animal sources.

The physical information encoded in the cosmological late-time wavefunction of the universe is tied to its singularity structure and its behaviour as such singularities are approached. One important singularity is identified by the vanishing of the total energy, where the wavefunction reduces to the physics of scattering in flat space. In this paper, we discuss the behaviour of the perturbative wavefunction as its other singularities are approached and the role played by the flat-space scattering, in the simplified context of the class of toy models admitting a first principle definition in terms of cosmological polytopes. The problems then translates into the analysis of the structure of its facets, one of which -the scattering facet -beautifully encodes the flat-space S-matrix. We show that all the boundaries of the cosmological polytope encode information about the flat-space physics. In particular, a subset of its facets turns out to have a similar structure as the scattering facet, with the vertices which can be grouped together to form lower dimensional scattering facets. The other facets admit one (and only one) triangulation in terms of products of lower dimensional scattering facets. As a consequence, the whole perturbative wavefunction can be represented as a sum of product of flat-space scattering amplitudes. Finally, we turn the table around and ask whether the knowledge of the flat-space scattering amplitudes suffices to reconstruct the wavefunction of the universe. We show that, at least for our class of toy models, this is indeed the case at tree level if we are also provided with a subset of symmetries that the wavefunction ought to satisfy. Once the tree cosmological polytopes are reconstructed, the loop ones can be obtained as a particular projection of them.

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The concepts of Lorentz invariance of local (flat space) physics, and unitarity of time evolution and the S-matrix, are famously rigid and robust, admitting no obvious consistent theoretical deformations, and confirmed to incredible accuracy by experiments. But neither of these notions seem to appear directly in describing the spatial correlation functions at future infinity characterizing the "boundary" observables in cosmology. How then can we see them emerge as exact concepts from a possible ab-initio theory for the late-time wavefunction of the universe? In this letter we examine this question in a simple but concrete setting, for the perturbative wavefunction in a class of scalar field models where an ab-initio description of the wavefunction has been given by "cosmological polytopes". Singularities of the wavefunction are associated with facets of the polytope. One of the singularities -corresponding to the "total energy pole" -is well known to be associated with the flat-space scattering amplitude. We show how the combinatorics and geometry of this scattering facet of the cosmological polytope straightforwardly leads to the emergence of Lorentz invariance and unitarity for the S-matrix. Unitarity follows from the way boundaries of the scattering facet factorize into products of lower-dimensional polytopes, while Lorentz invariance follows from a contour integral representation of the canonical form, which exists for any polytope, specialized to cosmological polytopes.