Appearance of fetal pain could be associated with maturation of the mesodiencephalic structures.

Fetal pain remains a controversial subject both in terms of recognizing its existence and the time-frame within which it appears. This article investigates the hypothesis that pain perception during development is not related to any determined structures of the central nervous system (CNS), on the contrary, the process of perception could be made with any structure satisfying conditions that the perception of pain is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. According to this definition, chronic decerebrate and decorticate experimental animals, anencephalic, and hydranencephalic patients demonstrate that the basic, most general, appropriate interaction with the environment can be achieved with a functional mesodiencephalon (brain stem, and diencephalon) as the hierarchically highest structure of the CNS during development.

In vitro study on digestion of pumpkin oil cake protein hydrolysate: evaluation of impact on bioactive properties.

In this work, a simulated gastrointestinal digestion of pumpkin oil cake protein hydrolysate prepared by alcalase (AH) was studied to evaluate the impact of the main gastrointestinal proteases on its antiradical and angiotensin I-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitory activity. The in vitro digestion was performed in a model system under optimized reaction conditions, first by pepsin and then with α-chymotrypsin and trypsin, simultaneously. The treatment with the gastrointestinal proteases led to a significant increase of the degree of hydrolysis, up to 55.