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Microbiome-based biotechnology for reducing food loss post harvest
Microbiomes have an immense potential to enhance plant resilience to various biotic and abiotic stresses. However, intrinsic microbial communities respond to changes in their host's physiology and environment during plant's life cycle. The potential of the inherent plant microbiome has been neglected for a long time, especially for the postharvest period. Currently, close to 50% of all produced fruits and vegetables are lost either during production or storage. Biological control of spoilage and storage diseases is still lacking sufficiency. Today, novel multiomics technologies allow us to study the microbiome and its responses on a community level, which will help to advance current classic approaches and develop more effective and robust microbiome-based solutions for fruit and vegetable storability, quality, and safety.
Hollow square core fiber sensor for physical parameters measurement
The measurement of physical parameters is important in many current applications, since they often rely on these measurands to operate with the due quality and the necessary safety. In this work, a simple and robust optical fiber sensor based on an antiresonant hollow square core fiber (HSCF) is proposed to measure simultaneously temperature, strain, and curvature. The proposed sensor was designed in a transmission configuration where a segment of HSCF, with a 10 mm length, was spliced between two single mode fibers. In this sensor, a cladding modal interference (CMI) and a Mach-Zehnder interference (MZI) are enhanced along with the antiresonance (AR) guidance. All the present mechanisms exhibit different responses towards the physical parameters. For the temperature, sensitivities of 32.8 pm/°C, 18.9 pm/°C, and 15.7 pm/°C were respectively attained for the MZI, AR, and CMI. As for the strain, sensitivities of 0.45 pm/μϵ, -0.93 pm/μϵ, and -2.72 pm/μϵ were acquired for the MZI, AR and CMI respectively. Meanwhile, for the curvature measurements, two regions of analysis were considered. In the first region (0 m-1 - 0.7 m-1) sensitivities of 0.033 nm/m-1, -0.27 nm/m-1, and -2.21 nm/m-1 were achieved, whilst for the second region (0.7 m-1 - 1.5 m-1) sensitivities of 0.067 nm/m-1, -0.63 nm/m-1, and -0.49 nm/m-1 were acquired for the MZI, AR and CMI, respectively.