Folate is an important vitamin mainly ingested from vegetables, and folate deficiency causes various health problems. Recently, several studies demonstrated folate biofortification in plants or food crops by metabolic engineering through genetic modifications. However, the production and sales of genetically modified foods are under strict regulation. Here, we developed a new approach to achieve folate biofortification in spinach (Spinacia oleracea) without genetic modification. We hydroponically cultivated spinach with the addition of three candidate compounds expected to fortify folate. As a result of liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry analysis, we found that the addition of phenylalanine increased the folate content up to 2.0-fold (306 μg in 100 g of fresh spinach), representing 76.5% of the recommended daily allowance for adults. By measuring the intermediates of folate biosynthesis, we revealed that phenylalanine activated folate biosynthesis in spinach by increasing the levels of pteridine and p-aminobenzoic acid. Our approach is a promising and practical approach to cultivate nutrient-enriched vegetables.
In this paper, the overview of resource circulation, waste and recycling in Japan is reported based on statistical data, and some current issues are discussed. It is considered that the background and the present circumstances as described above include both common and different viewpoints when compared with other countries. It is the author's intention to show that these pieces of information are more or less usable for analysis and discussion of such field in other countries.
Resource Recycle Rate in JapanThe latest statistics data on total material flow in Japan indicating whole resource inputs, consumptions and recycled amount is published for the 2014 fiscal year. (Hereinafter, 2014 FY. The fiscal year in Japan starts from April.). The summary of material flow is shown in Figure 1 [2]. According to this chart, the total material input (that is, the sum of imported and domestic resources and recycled amount) in 2014FY was 1,649 Mt (million tons) and the domestic recycled amount was 261 Mt. The ratio of the recycled amount to the total material input (hereinafter referred to as RRR, or Resource Recycle Rate) was 15.8%. Figure 2 shows the trend of the RRR over the 20 years from 1994 FY [3]. The
The subject of this paper is a space robot that has a manipulator arm mounted on a satellite body. This paper investigates the problem for stabilizing the attitude of both the main body of a space robot and the joint angles of a manipulator independently and simultaneously. Two control methods are proposed here for the solutions of this problem. One is a time-varying feedback controller, and the other is a time-invariant feedback controller. The former controller has the theoretical success for the topological obstructions, but has the practical disadvantage. In contrast, the latter controller has the practical usefulness in spite of the theoretical incompleteness. Furthermore, it is shown that each control method has the robustness against the presence of parametric uncertainties such as model errors and signal noises. The effectiveness of each controller is verified by numerical simulations.
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