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Healthy ginseng pudding was made with different doses of two gelling agents and stored at 37℃ for eight weeks. And then quality characteristics and palatability were measured. Sweetness and pH level increased in newly made ginseng puddings but decreased during storage. Acid taste decreased but increased during storage in A (pectin 0.2%+agar 0.6%). But it increased but subsequently decreased in B (agar 0.8%). Acidity in C (agar 1%) remained unchanged until six weeks but slightly increased at 8 weeks of storage. Texture increased in all specimens but subsequently decreased. Chromaticity value of L decreased in all specimens before increasing while the values of a and b increased and subsequently decreased. In texture examination, hardness and adhesion were higher in C (agar 1%) and lower in A (pectin 0.2%+agar 0.6%). There were no differences in elasticity among three specimens. Cohesion was higher in C (agar 1%) while it showed a similar level in A (pectin 0.2%+agar 0.6%) and B(agar 0.8%). Stickiness and chewiness were higher in C(agar 1%) but lower in A(Pectin 0.2%+agar 0.6%), compared with C(agar 1%) specimen. In sensory test, overall palatability was higher in A (Pectin 0.2%+agar 0.6%). In conclusion, ginseng pudding with 0.6% agar and 0.2% pectin exhibited better quality. And ginseng pudding has potential to be developed as healthy dessert considering ample physiological and functional properties.

The rapid and accurate diagnosis of infectious diseases with high morbidity rates is crucial because it can minimize the misuse and overuse of antibiotics and increase survival rates in dreadful conditions. The conventional antibiotic susceptibility test (AST) systems used to choose appropriate antibiotics require long wait times to obtain results and cannot prevent the misuse or overuse of antibiotics by clinicians who need to quickly treat patients and cannot wait to identify the underlying cause of their symptoms. Therefore, several rapid AST (rAST) methods have been developed to provide quick test results, but they are complicated to operate, require additional equipment or materials, and give less accurate results than the conventional AST methods. In this study, we propose an rAST method that can obtain precise outcomes from a simple process with a short running time using a bacterial isolation microwell-plug (μWELLplug) in a conventional 96-well plate. The specifically designed hydrogel component of the μWELLplug provides a simple process for cell isolation and the observation of bacterial growth and morphological changes induced by a variety of antibiotic concentrations. The μWELLplug is placed over each well of the 96-well plate, and then bacterial or eukaryotic cells are isolated in the microwells and treated with different antibiotic concentrations to observe their effects. Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast, eukaryote), Streptomyces atratus (actinomycetes, prokaryote), Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and methicillin-resistant S. aureus were cultivated and tested using the μWELLplug. The minimum inhibitory concentration values from this system were obtained in 3−4 h and correlated well with those from the conventional AST methods whose running time is 18−24 h.

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