No abstract

To obtain blueberry juice with a high content of antioxidants it is necessary to introduce an enzymatic depectinization step into the process. Due to the importance of this step in the final properties of blueberry juice it is critical that the operation conditions be optimized. The aim of this research was to evaluate the effects of temperature, duration of treatment and enzymatic complex concentration on anthocyanin content and juice yield during enzymatic depectinization. Results indicated that the best factor combination was 50ºC during 1.3h and 4mg 100g-1 of LAFASE(r) CLARIFICATION and 8mg 100g-1 of LAFASE(r) HE GRAND CRU enzymatic complex concentration. Under these conditions, blueberry juice with 798.41±8.03mg of cyanidin-3-glucoside L-1 and a juice yield of 87% was obtained. The combination of the response surface and desirability function methodologies enabled the optimization of the blueberry juice during the depectinization step, in terms of anthocyanin content and juice yield.

Writing is extremely challenging for engineering students. Navarro (2012) asserts that academic literacy in the mother tongue is similar to learning a foreign language as it involves immersion in a new culture. Food Engineering undergraduates (School of Food Science, University of Entre Ríos) face this difficulty when they have to write their Final Project. As a consequence, interdisciplinary actions were implemented by engineers and linguists (both in English and Spanish) in order to raise students´ awareness of this genre characteristics, to facilitate its production and to write relevant titles and abstracts. The importance of both title and abstract is paramount once the Final Projects are uploaded to the university website in order to attract readers. The objective of this study was to explore whether interdisciplinary actions could optimize undergraduates´ written production. All titles produced since the first Food Engineer graduated were collected. This corpus analysis revealed that titles were extremely short and provided very little information. Consequently, pedagogical activities were designed and implemented as from 2012. An exploration of antecedent or prior genre knowledge (Artemeva, N. & Fox., J., 2010) was carried out in different workshops. Generic structure, audience awareness, rhetorical functions and linguistic features studied in the English courses were activated. Writing seminars in Spanish were implemented in 5º year. In addition, undergraduates attended tutorials with the engineers and then and then interviews with the linguists. In several meetings students discussed titles and abstracts (in Spanish and English), designed their slides for the oral defense and rehearsed their oral presentations. The analysis of the corpus including all projects´ titles defended within the time window that included our actions indicated that students had activated their previous generic knowledge. Feedback from students, after graduation, demonstrated that interdisciplinary activities included language as an across the curriculum content and contributed to the adequate production of academic genres. Results may affect curricular design and decisions at the macro level

Since the 1990s, in Argentina there has been considerable concern over whether higher education institutions must undertake the responsibility of teaching academic skills to their student population or if both undergraduates and graduates ought to cope with the enculturation process without assistance. Although academics seem to have reached an agreement and have put forward a number of actions aimed at facilitating the access of university students into their target discourse communities, there is still heated debate about how the issue must be approached. In this article we describe the initiatives carried out at two engineering colleges: the Facultad de Ciencias de la Alimentación and the Facultad de Ingeniería belonging to the Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos that have paved the way for the inclusion of academic literacy development in the curriculum.