2021, Articolo in rivista, ENG
Scurria A., Albanese L., Pagliaro M., Zabini F., Giordano F., Meneguzzo F., Ciriminna R.
Isolating cellulose from citrus processing waste without employing chemicals has so far been an unfulfilled goal of chemical research applied to the valorization of a widely available biowaste, annually totaling >100 million tonnes. We have applied hydrodynamic cavitation using a Venturi-type reactor for the extraction of all valued bioproducts of industrial citrus processing waste in water only, directly on a semi-industrial scale. After reporting the discovery of IntegroPectin in the soluble fraction of the aqueous extract, we now report the isolation of a cellulosic material in the water-insoluble fraction of cavitated lemon and grapefruit processing waste. Named "CytroCell", the material is cellulose of low crystallinity, high porosity, good water holding capacity and good dispersibility in water. These properties open the route to mass-scale production of a useful functional material from a cheap and abundant biowaste.
2021, Articolo in rivista, ENG
Scurria A., Sciortino M., Presentato A., Lino C., Piacenza E., Albanese L., Zabini F., Meneguzzo F., Nuzzo D., Pagliaro M., Chillura Martino D.F., Alduina R., Avellone G., Ciriminna R.
An HS-SPME GC-MS analysis of the volatile compounds adsorbed at the outer surface of lemon and grapefruit pectins obtained via the hydrodynamic cavitation of industrial waste streams of lemon and grapefruit peels in water suggests important new findings en route to understanding the powerful and broad biological activity of these new pectic materials. In agreement with the ultralow degree of esterification of these pectins, the high amount of highly bioactive ?-terpineol and terpinen-4-ol points to limonene (and linalool) decomposition catalyzed by residual citric acid in the citrus waste peel residue of the juice industrial production.
2020, Articolo in rivista, ENG
Nuzzo D., Cristaldi L., Sciortino M., Albanese L., Scurria A., Zabini F., Lino C., Pagliaro M., Meneguzzo F., Di Carlo M., Ciriminna R.
Lemon pectin extracted along with water-soluble flavonoids and other phytochemicals from citrus industry's waste lemon peel via hydrodynamic cavitation in water, directly at pre-industrial scale and further isolated via freeze drying, shows exceptionally high antioxidant and non-cytotoxic activity. Preliminary investigation indicates also significant antimicrobial activity. These findings open the route to the development of new nutraceutical and healthcare applications of a versatile biopolymer endowed with new functionality, rapidly and conveniently obtained from an abundant by-product of the agri-food industry.
2019, Presentazione, ITA
Piccini, S., Abrate, M., Bellandi, A., and Giovannetti, E
Con il presente contributo proponiamo un modello ed uno strumento volti a rappresentare formalmente, interrogare e visualizzare l'evoluzione diacronica di concetti e termini in un dato dominio, nel quadro del web semantico. Quest'ultimo sta attirando sempre più l'attenzione di lessicografi e terminologi computazionali, in quanto garantisce interoperabilità, facile accesso e riuso delle risorse lessicali/terminologiche all'interno di una comunità scientifica.
2018, Articolo in rivista, ENG
Caputo L.; Quintieri L.; Cavalluzzi M.M.; Lentini G.; Habtemariam S.
Citrus pomace is a huge agro-food industrial waste mostly composed of peels and traditionally used as compost or animal feed. Owing to its high content of compounds beneficial to humans (e.g., flavonoids, phenol-like acids, and terpenoids), citrus waste is increasingly used to produce valuable supplements, fragrance, or antimicrobials. However, such processes require sustainable and efficient extraction strategies by solvent-free techniques for environmentally-friendly good practices. In this work, we evaluated the antimicrobial and antibiofilm activity of water extracts of three citrus peels (orange, lemon, and citron) against ten different sanitary relevant bacteria. Both conventional extraction methods using hot water (HWE) and microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) were used. Even though no extract fully inhibited the growth of the target bacteria, these latter (mostly pseudomonads) showed a significant reduction in biofilm biomass. The most active extracts were obtained from orange and lemon peel by using MAE at 100 °C for 8 min. These results showed that citrus peel water infusions by MAE may reduce biofilm formation possibly enhancing the susceptibility of sanitary-related bacteria to disinfection procedures.
2018, Poster, ENG
Cavalluzzi MM, Caputo L ,Quintieri L, Milani G, Lentini G, Habtemariam S, Corbo F
Citrus pomace is a huge agro-food industrial waste mostly composed of peels. Owing to its high content of compounds beneficial to humans (e.g., flavonoids, phenol-like acids, and terpenoids), citrus waste is increasingly used to produce valuable supplements, fragrance, or antimicrobials. Sustainable and efficient extraction strategies by solvent-free techniques for environmentally-friendly good practices should be desirable. In this work, both conventional extraction methods using hot water (HWE) and microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) were used to obtain water extracts. The antimicrobial and antibiofilm activity of water extracts of three citrus peels (orange, lemon, and citron) against ten different sanitary relevant bacteria were evaluated. Even though no extract fully inhibited the growth of the target bacteria, these latter (mostly pseudomonads) showed a significant reduction in biofilm biomass. The most active extracts were obtained from orange and lemon peel by using MAE at 100 °C for 8 min. These results showed that citrus peel water infusions by MAE may reduce biofilm formation possibly enhancing the susceptibility of sanitary-related bacteria to disinfection procedures
2018, Software, ENG
Andrea Bellandi
LexO is a web collaborative editor of lexical and termino-ontological resources. LexO is meant to be used mainly by humanists and, thus, hide all the technical complexities related to the adopted formal languages. Being a web application, LexO makes collaborative editing possible: a team of users, each one with his/her own role (lexicographers, domain experts, scholars, etc.), can work on the same resource collaboratively. As a result, resources quickly increase in size and are constantly updated. LexO adheres to international standards for representing lexica and ontologies in the Semantic Web (such as lemon and OWL), so that lexical resources can be shared easily or specific entities can be linked to existing datasets. LexO intends to provide features to link each entity of the resource (being it a form, a term, a concept, etc.) to a text or to a very specific portion of a text, via citational references mechanisms. Conceived to handle historical and ancient lexica and terminologies as well, LexO is flexible and extensible enough to formalize peculiar features of such linguistic resources. The development of LexO has been partially funded by the DFG in the context of the cooperation agreement between prof. Guido Mensching, director of the DiTMAO project at the Seminar für Romanische Philologie of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" of the Italian National Research Council (August 29th, 2016).
2016, Contributo in atti di convegno, ENG
Khalfi, Mustapha; Nahli, Ouafae; Zarghili, Arsalane
In order to enrich the digital content of Classical Arabic, we aim to propose and represent the Arabic dictionary "'Al-Qamus Al-Muhit" in the standard format LEMON. Printed transition to digital format requires various steps of work. This article describes the procedures that we followed to convert the dictionary in digitized and encoded format to apply automatic extractions and get the Lemon format used in semantic web. Furthermore, due to Arabic dictionary complexity, formalize lexical and semantic information involves morphosyntactic and derivational knowledge that we try to explain.
2016, Contributo in volume, ENG
Francesca Frontini Riccardo Del Gratta Monica Monachini
This paper illustrates the transformation of GeoNames' ontology concepts, with their English labels and glosses, into a GeoDomain WordNet-like resource in English, its translation into Italian, and its linking to the existing generic WordNets of both languages. The paper describes the criteria used for the linking of domain synsets to each other and to the generic ones and presents the published resource in RDF according to the w3c and lemon schema.
2016, Contributo in atti di convegno, ENG
Khan, F., Frontini, F., Boschetti, F., Monachini, M.
The emergence and growing popularity of Linked Open Data (LOD) offers researchers a new range of possibilities when it comes to publishing datasets online (Hyvönen 2012, Oomen et al 2012); indeed not only does the success of LOD greatly facilitate the process of making scholarly data accessible and to a wider community but it also permits the enrichment of individual datasets by linking them to the other datasets available on the so called Linked Open Data Cloud. The advantages of Linked Open Data for teachers, academics and students in the humanities are obvious and are indeed manifold. However there is currently a paucity of linked open datasets in fields such as philology and literary studies, and in particular of datasets that deal with classical languages such as ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin. This seems strange given the rich abundance of surviving works, of both a religious and secular character, that exist in those languages. A salient consideration here relates to the fact that even when such works have been digitised and made available in a format such as TEI-XML, a format which renders the structure and content of such texts more amenable to computer processing, the conversion of these resources into the Resource Data Framework (RDF), the standardised data model that underpins the Semantic Web, is not always straightforward. In this article we describe ongoing work in the conversion of an important 19th century Ancient Greek resource the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon, into RDF, part of a wider program of work that has been recently initiated at CNR-ILC in converting historical lexicons in languages such as Greek, Latin and Arabic into Linked Open Data.
2015, Articolo in rivista, ENG
Del Gratta Riccardo, Francesca Frontini, Fahad Khan, Monica Monachini
This paper describes the publication and linking of (parts of) PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS (PSC), a large scale Italian lexicon, to the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud using the lemon model. The main challenge of the conversion is discussed, namely the reconciliation between the PSC semantic structure which contains richly encoded semantic information, following the qualia structure of the Generative Lexicon theory and the lemon view of lexical sense as a reified pairing of a lexical item and a concept in an ontology. The result is two datasets: one consists of a list of lemon lexical entries with their lexical properties, relations and senses; the other consists of a list of OWL individuals representing the referents for the lexical senses. These OWL individuals are linked to each other by a set of semantic relations and mapped onto the SIMPLE OWL ontology of higher level semantic types.
2014, Contributo in atti di convegno, ENG
Fahad Khan, Federico Boschetti, Francesca Frontini
In this paper we propose a model, called lemonDIA, for representing lexical semantic change using the lemon framework and based on the ontological notion of the perdurant. Namely we extend the notion of sense in lemon by adding a temporal dimension and then define a class of perdurant entities that represents a shift in meaning of a word and which contains different related senses. We start by discussing the general problem of semantic shift and the utility of being able to easily access and represent such information in diachronic lexical resources. We then describe our model and illustrate it with examples.
2013, Contributo in atti di convegno, ENG
Francesca Frontini, Riccardo Del Gratta, Monica Monachini.
This paper illustrates the transformation of the GeoNames ontology concepts, with their English labels and glosses, into a GeoDomain WordNet-like resource in English, its translation into Italian, and its linking to the existing generic WordNets of both languages.
2005, Articolo in rivista
Balmas, V; Scherm, B; Ghignone, S; Salem, AOM; Cacciola, SO; Migheli, Q
Thirty six isolates of Phoma tracheiphila from Italy, the causal agent of the "mal secco" disease on Citrus species, were characterised by different molecular tools in comparison with representative isolates of other phytopathogenic Phoma species. These included analysis of the distribution of RAPD and microsatellite markers and sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the nuclear rRNA genes. The results obtained with 12 RAPD primers (92 markers) and 7 microsatellite primers (56 markers) suggest that Italian isolates of P. tracheiphila are genetically homogeneous, leading to identical patterns upon amplification with all the tested primers. Accordingly, ITSI-5.8S-ITS2 sequences were highly conserved (98-100% identity along a 544-characters alignment) among all the isolates of P. tracheiphila. A neighbor-joining analysis of ITS sequences of P. tracheiphila in comparison with those of other Phoma species, as well as with alignable sequences from anamorphic and teleomorphic taxa retrieved in BLAST searches, revealed a close relationship between P. tracheiphila and Leptosphaeria congesta. A pair of P. tracheiphila-specific primers was designed on the consensus sequence (555 residues) obtained from the alignment of the newly generated P. tracheiphila ITS sequences. A PCR-based specific assay coupled to electrophoretic separation of amplicons made it possible to detect P. tracheiphila in naturally infected Citrus wood tissue collected from both symptomatic and symptomless plants. The limit of detection was 10 pg of genomic DNA and 5 fg of the ITS target sequence.
1999, Articolo in rivista, ENG
Fatta del Bosco S., Tusa N., Conicella C.
Microsporogenesis was analysed in a tetraploid somatic hybrid (SH) (2n=4x=36) of Citrus and its diploid fusion parents (2n=2x=18), Valencia sweet orange (C. sinensis L. Osbeck) and Femminello lemon (C. limon L. Burm. f.). Intergenomic pairing between lemon and orange occurred in the somatic hybrid which showed multivalent chromosome associations in diakinesis, although one quadrivalent was definitely because of a reciprocal translocation present in Valencia. The behaviour of univalents was variable in the somatic hybrid and its parents. In the somatic hybrid and Valencia, the univalents preferentially formed micronuclei and polyads whereas, in Femminello, they were generally enclosed in a nucleus although distributed randomly. The somatic hybrid showed a rate of pollen stainability of 64% and germinability of 41%. The chromosomally unbalanced pollen from the tetraploid SH was presumed viable and able to fertilize because different nuclear DNA contents were found in the back-cross progeny. Moreover, meiotic nuclear restitution mechanisms, which could be mainly dependent on the abnormal orientation of the spindles in meiosis II, are described.