This study was conducted to investigate the antioxidant vitamin C, the polyphenol content, and the hydrophilic antioxidant capacity of tomato juice, baked tomatoes, tomato sauce, and tomato soup. During the production of tomato juice and during the preparation of the other tomato products, samples were taken after different times, respectively, after each particular production step. High-performance liquid chromatography was used to determine the content of vitamin C. The total phenolics content was analyzed spectrophotometrically by using the Folin-Ciocalteu method. The hydrophilic antioxidant capacity was measured by using three different methods: the Trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity assay, the ferric reducing antioxidant power test, and the photochemiluminescence assay. The vitamin C contents of the tomato products decreased during the thermal processing of tomatoes. In contrast, the total phenolics concentration and the water soluble antioxidant capacity increased.

Strawberries were processed to juice, nectar, wine, and puree. For investigation of the antioxidant capacity as well as the contents of ascorbic acid, total phenolics and total anthocyanins, samples were taken after different stages of production to determine the effects of processing. The content of vitamin C was measured spectrophotometrically. The total phenolic content was analyzed by using the Folin-Ciocalteu method, and the amount of total anthocyanins was determined by using the pH-differential method. Two different methods-the trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity assay and the ferric reducing antioxidant power test-were used to determine the hydrophilic antioxidant capacity. This study showed the decrease of all investigated parameters within processing strawberries to different products. The content of ascorbic acid decreased with production time and processing steps, especially during heat treatment. The investigations on total phenolics in strawberry products proved fining to be a mild method to clarify berry juices and wines without removing high amounts of total phenolics. Fermentation did not lead to heavy losses of total phenolics, probably due to polymerization and condensation of monomer phenolics such as anthocyanins. Total anthocyanins and the hydrophilic antioxidant capacity decreased while using high temperatures. Anthocyanins also decreased considerably during the processing of wines, mainly caused by fermentation and pasteurization.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of different types of tomato processing on contents of lycopene, beta-carotene, and alpha-tocopherol. Samples of tomato sauce, tomato soup, baked tomato slices, and tomato juice were taken at different times of heating, respectively, after each step of production. HPLC was used to analyze contents of carotenoids and vitamin E. Due to the loss of water during thermal processing, contents of lycopene, beta-carotene, and alpha-tocopherol on a wet weight basis increased. On a dry weight basis, contents of lycopene increased or decreased depending on the origin of the tomatoes used, whereas the beta-carotene contents decreased or were quite stable. In contrast to lycopene, beta-carotene isomerized due to thermal processing. The alpha-tocopherol contents significantly rose during short-term heating. The increase was not caused by release of alpha-tocopherol from the seeds containing predominantly gamma-tocopherol and accounting for 2% of total alpha-tocopherol content only.

Five apple juices were produced on a pilot scale by crushing the fruit, treating the mash with pectolytic enzymes, pressing, extracting water from the pomace, pasteurization, treatment of the juice with enzymes, combined gelatin/silica sol fining and final ultrafiltration. The temperature of the mash treatment was either ambient or one of 30, 40, 50 or 60°C, in order to test whether this led to different compositional changes in the corresponding juices. The main emphasis was put on detection of D-galacturonic acid as the indicator substance for the extent of the enzymatic treatment. In the pasteurized raw juices after pressing we found values from 226 to 398 mg L )1 . A distinct increase of the galacturonic acid levels could be observed during the clarification steps. Enzymatic juice treatment raised the concentrations to 580-720 mg L )1 . After ultrafiltration, final values of 790-1100 mg L )1 were measured. Generally, the highest values were found in the 50°C sample, which is the optimum temperature for pectinase activity. This was also true for the colloid concentrations and polyphenols. The influence of the temperature of the enzymatic mash treatment on other characteristic juice parameters like total titratable acidity, density, sugar, and minerals concentrations was low.

Software quality in computational tools impacts research output in a variety of scientific disciplines. Biology is one of these fields, especially for High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) data, such tools play an important role. This study therefore characterises the overall quality of a selection of tools which are frequently part of HTS pipelines, as well as analyses the maintainability and process quality of a selection of HTS alignment tools. Our findings highlight the most pressing issues, and point to software engineering best practices developed for the improvement of maintenance and process quality. To help future research, we share the tooling for the static code analysis with SonarCloud which we used to collect data on the maintainability of different alignment tools. The results of the analysis show that the maintainability level is generally high but trends towards increasing technical debt over time. We also observed that the development activities on alignment tools are generally driven by very few developers and are not utilising modern tooling to their advantage. Based on these observations, we recommend actions to improve both maintainability and process quality in open source alignment tools. Those actions include improvements in tooling like the use of linters as well as better documentation of architecture and features. We encourage developers to use these tools in order to ease future maintenance efforts, increase user experience, support reproducibility, and ultimately increase the quality of research through increasing the quality of research software tools.