Cegep de Victoriaville

Dairy white wastewater (WW), a by-product of industrial cleaning processes, contains residual milk proteins that can be enzymatically converted into bioactive peptides. In this study, WW proteins were hydrolyzed using four enzymes, pepsin, trypsin, thermolysin, and pronase E, for up to 240min, and the resulting hydrolysates were evaluated for ACE inhibition, DPP-IV inhibition, and antioxidant capacity. Thermolysin hydrolysates exhibited the strongest ACE inhibition, with IC50 values as low as 21.0μg protein/mL, whereas pepsin and pronase E hydrolysates showed DPP-IV inhibitory activities with IC50 values of 2.4-3.1mg protein/mL. Pepsin hydrolysates presented the highest antioxidant capacity, reaching 3.5μM Trolox equivalents/mg protein. LC-MS/MS analysis combined with multivariate statistics identified 60 discriminant peptides, including 17 peptides previously reported to possess antihypertensive, antidiabetic, and/or antioxidant bioactivities. Based on a combination of PLS-DA loadings, QSAR scores, novelty relative to known bioactive peptides and physicochemical diversity, 20 peptides were synthesized and validated experimentally. Several peptides such as LRF, QW, GAWY, PPF, GPIVL, and SFNPTQL exhibited potent inhibitory effects, with micromolar IC50 values for ACE and/or DPP-IV. In comparison to chemically synthesized ACE inhibitors like captopril, the most potent peptide, LRF, is five times more active on a molar basis (11.34μM vs 63.06μM). These findings demonstrate that WW is a promising source of multifunctional peptides and that integrating peptidomics with machine learning accelerates peptide discovery and validation.

This study aimed to compare levels of happiness of older women and men living in conventional dwellings (CD) and independent living facilities (ILF), and examine happiness’ associations with thriving, social participation, community integration and ageism (self-directed and discrimination). A cross-sectional survey was conducted with a random sample of 509 older adults in CD and 470 in ILF in Quebec, Canada. Participants’ mean age was 82.22 ± 5.35, and two-thirds were women. Levels of happiness were similar in both sexes and settings. Greater happiness was associated with greater thriving for all (β = 0.28–1.48), social participation for women in CD (β = 0.67), community integration in CD (β = 0.42 for women and 1.18 for men), and reduced ageism, i.e., discrimination for women in CD (β = −1.02) and men in ILF (β = −0.28), and self-directed for men in CD (β = −0.21). The findings demonstrate that happiness was associated with factors related to the living environment and could be enhanced through targeted interventions.

Nanostructured β-CoMoO4 catalysts have been prepared via the thermal decomposition of an oxalate precursor. The catalyst was characterized by infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller method (BET), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The efficiency of these nanoparticles in the reduction of ortho- and meta-nitrophenol isomers (2-NP, 3-NP, and 4-NP) to their corresponding aminophenols was tested using UV-visible spectroscopy measurements. It was found that, with a β-CoMoO4 catalyst, NaBH4 reduces 3-NP instantaneously, whilst the reduction of 2-NP and 4-NP is slower at 8 min. This difference is thought to arise from the lower acidity of 3-NP, where the negative charge of the phenolate could not be delocalized onto the oxygen atoms of the meta-nitro group.

Microphone array techniques are an efficient tool to detect acoustic source positions. The standard technique is the delay and sum beamforming. In the time domain, the generalized cross correlation of the microphone signals is used to compute the Spatial Likelihood Functions (SLF) of all microphone pairs and the noise source map is provided by the arithmetic mean of these functions. To improve the former noise source map, which means narrowing the main lobe and removing side and spurious lobes, several techniques have been developed in the past. In this work, the performances of three of these techniques (in terms of source position detection, amplitude estimation and computation time) are compared in the case of both synthetic and real data: (1) energetic and geometric criteria are applied in order to remove the SLF with useless information, (2) the arithmetic mean is replaced by the generalized mean and (3) linear inverse problem is solved with sparsity constraint. In the case of real data, the source to be located and quantified is an impulsive noise radiated by nail guns which is recorded by a spiral arm microphone array.

L’abbé Grégoire (1750-1831) n’est pas à proprement parler un oublié de la Révolution française, mais sa politique linguistique d’éradication des patois sous la Constituante et la Convention passe, elle, souvent inaperçue, alors qu’elle pose un jalon capital dans la longue durée de l’histoire de la langue française. C’est en regard d’une politique du livre héritée des Lumières et de son préjugé favorable à la lettre que l’abbé Grégoire tente de mettre en place une politique répressive des dialectes et patois afin de faire entrer la différence de la phonê dans la gramma. Cette manière de voir les rapports entre langue et patois aura des conséquences politiques et littéraires tout au long du xixe siècle, perceptibles chez George Sand notamment, dont le roman Jeanne (1844) donne à lire les conséquences directes d’une folklorisation des langues marginales, les repoussant du côté d’une divinisation poétique dorénavant dépourvue d’efficace sociale.

Si le Québec s’est très bien exporté culturellement dans les dernières décennies, surtout depuis la Révolution tranquille, on ne peut passer sous silence le fait qu’inversement, les chercheurs québécois ont aussi beaucoup contribué à faire du Québec une plaque tournante de l’activité de recherche dans nombre de disciplines, au premier chef desquelles on trouve forcément la littérature française et sa composante majeure que demeure celle du xixe siècle. L’exercice de panorama fournit ici en ce sens l’occasion de tenter une désignation nouvelle de la réalité de la recherche québécoise sur la littérature du xixe siècle telle qu’elle se pratique. Mais il s’agira aussi de montrer l’effet inattendu et souvent inaperçu de persistances culturelles dans le choix effectué par certains chercheurs. Enfin, il s’agira de souligner que les dominantes méthodologiques du champ québécois en recherche sur le xixe siècle français demeurent nettement l’histoire littéraire et les différentes composantes sociologiques et sociocritiques qui ont occasionné des discussions si vives ces dernières années dans le milieu universitaire québécois.