Information and communication technologies, specifically the Internet of Things (IoT), have been widely used in many agricultural practices, including beekeeping, where the adoption of advanced technologies has an increasing trend. Implementation of precision apiculture methods into beekeeping practice depends on availability and cost-effectiveness of honey bee colony monitoring systems. This study presents a developed bee colony monitoring system based on the IoT concept and using ESP8266 and ESP32 microchips.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFApple orchards are perennially planted where pesticides are applied to control numerous pests and diseases. The extensive long-term use of fungicides can lead to overall environmental load and resistance risk. This study aims to assess which fungicide-active substances have been used more intensively in the last decade in Latvia, evaluating the overall environmental load using the Pesticide Load Indicator (PLI).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe complex of polysaccharides of the grain transforms during processing and modifies the physical and chemical characteristics of bread. The aim of the research was to characterize the changes of glucans, mannans and fructans in hull-less barley and wholegrain wheat breads fermented with spontaneous hull-less barley sourdough, germinated hull-less barley sourdough and yeast, as well as to analyze the impact of polysaccharides on the physical parameters of bread. By using the barley sourdoughs for wholegrain wheat bread dough fermentation, the specific volume and porosity was reduced; the hardness was not significantly increased, but the content of β-glucans was doubled.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFinding a proper location for a bee apiary is a crucial task for beekeepers and especially for travelling beekeepers. Normally beekeepers choose an appropriate apiary location based on their previous experience and sometimes the location may not be optimal for the bee colonies. This can be explained by different flowering periods, variation of resources at the known fields, as well as other factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe European Union funded project SAMS (Smart Apiculture Management Services) enhances international cooperation of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and sustainable agriculture between EU and developing countries in pursuit of the EU commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goal "End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture". The project consortium comprises four partners from Europe (two from Germany, Austria, and Latvia) and two partners each from Ethiopia and Indonesia. Beekeeping with small-scale operations provides suitable innovation labs for the demonstration and dissemination of cost-effective and easy-to-use open source ICT applications in developing countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMetformin is the primary drug for type 2 diabetes treatment and a promising candidate for other disease treatment. It has significant deviations between individuals in therapy efficiency and pharmacokinetics, leading to the administration of an unnecessary overdose or an insufficient dose. There is a lack of data regarding the concentration-time profiles in various human tissues that limits the understanding of pharmacokinetics and hinders the development of precision therapies for individual patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe implementation of model-based designs in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology may fail. One of the reasons for this failure is that only a part of the real-world complexity is included in models. Still, some knowledge can be simplified and taken into account in the form of optimization constraints to improve the feasibility of model-based designs of metabolic pathways in organisms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe application of biologically and biochemically relevant constraints during the optimization of kinetic models reduces the impact of suggested changes in processes not included in the scope of the model. This increases the probability that the design suggested by model optimization can be carried out by an organism after implementation of design in vivo. A case study was carried out to determine the impact of total enzyme activity and homeostatic constraints on the objective function values and the following ranking of adjustable parameter combinations.
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