The preservation of volatile flavour compounds in foods remains challenging because of evaporation, oxidation, thermal and photo-induced degradation, and partitioning within complex food matrices. Microencapsulation provides established protection and scalable processing routes, whereas nanoencapsulation can offer additional control over interfacial area, dispersion, carrier structure, and release. This review critically compares micro- and nano-encapsulation for flavour preservation, distinguishing retention during manufacture from stability during storage and flavour release and perception during consumption. It examines nanoemulsions, nanoliposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, nanostructured lipid carriers, protein- and polysaccharide-based nanocarriers, and selected hybrid systems, with emphasis on flavour chemistry, carrier–flavour interactions, release mechanisms, food-matrix effects, quantitative performance metrics, and sensory consequences. Nano-enabled packaging and nanosensing are considered only as indirect preservation or monitoring technologies and are explicitly distinguished from direct flavour delivery. The review further evaluates industrial scale-up, cost, technology readiness, safety, migration, regulatory requirements, and sustainability, alongside emerging approaches including AI-assisted formulation, machine learning, digital-twin modelling, microfluidic manufacturing, and precision flavour delivery. Overall, the review identifies when nanoencapsulation provides a meaningful technological advantage over microencapsulation and when conventional microencapsulation may remain the more practical choice.
The brewing industry, long celebrated for transforming beer from barley into one of the world’s most recognizable beverages, is now entering a new era driven by scientific precision and process improvement. Modern breweries are turning to advanced fermentation, enzyme manipulation, and integrated bioprocessing strategies to elevate ethanol production while maintaining the craftsmanship and quality attributes central to brewing heritage. This systematic review, structured according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, compiles emerging industrial advancements that enhance ethanol production during brewing. Development in barley-based brewing focuses on starch structure and composition, varietal improvement through breeding, and pre-treatment approaches to accelerate the release of fermentable sugars. Process refinements in malting, mashing, adjunct use as substrates, and metal ion supplementation are critically analyzed for their impact on sugar release and fermentation performance. In parallel, innovative fermentation platforms, including batch, continuous, fed-batch, high-brewing, and co-culture systems that integrate non-conventional yeasts or bacteria with conventional yeasts, are being explored for their potential to enhance ethanol yield, fermentation duration, and product quality. This review also highlights automation, enzyme-driven hydrolysis optimization, advanced fermentation strategies, and machine-learning-assisted process control as transformative tools shaping the next-generation of brewery-integrated ethanol production. Collectively, these synergistic developments position barley at the forefront of advanced brewing-centered ethanol improvement, reinforcing the brewery as both a cultural tradition and a modern bioprocessing system.
IntroductionAutomated plant leaf disease segmentation is crucial for accurate disease diagnosis and quantitative lesion assessment in precision agriculture. U-Net-based architectures are widely employed for this task, although their high computational complexity sometimes hinders their application in resource-constrained agricultural settings.MethodsThis work investigates depthwise separable convolutions in conjunction with a channel-reversed U-Net for tomato leaf disease segmentation. The channel-reversed encoder allocates more feature channels to the shallow layers and progressively fewer to the deeper layers, the reverse of a conventional U-Net’s channel schedule, with the aim of preserving spatial detail while reducing computation in the deeper, more computationally expensive stages. Depthwise separable convolutions are used throughout the encoder, bottleneck, and decoder to further reduce trainable parameters. The model was trained on lesion masks and evaluated on an independent, held-out subset of the PlantVillage tomato leaf dataset using Dice coefficient, IoU, precision, recall, and F1-score, following a corrected data-splitting protocol that eliminates train/test leakage present in an earlier version of this work.ResultsThe proposed method reduced trainable parameters by over 97% relative to a conventional U-Net (0.96 million versus 31.06 million), at a measured reduction in segmentation accuracy under the training budget evaluated (Dice coefficient 0.79 versus 0.90 for standard U-Net). A supplementary experiment with a longer training budget narrowed this gap substantially (Dice coefficient 0.85).DiscussionThese findings indicate that the parameter-efficient design requires more training to approach the accuracy of higher-parameter alternatives. We report this accuracy/efficiency trade-off directly, rather than claiming accuracy parity, and identify a full matched-budget comparison across all evaluated architectures as a priority for follow-up work. By demonstrating a substantial, disclosed parameter-efficiency gain, this approach is intended to support future development of low-cost disease diagnosis tools for resource-constrained agricultural settings. Validated real-time, on-device deployment remains a direction for future work.
Probiotics are highly essential for a healthy gut in order to maintain optimum microbial balance, fight against pathogenic bacteria, improve digestion and maintain overall intestinal health. The present investigation was carried out to evaluate the probiotic properties of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) isolated from traditional fermented foods of Southern India. The isolates cultures were tested for acid production using titratable acidity, and six maximum acid-producing (g/L) isolates (DFRM9 11.0, DFRM8 10.0, DFRA9 10.0, DFRD4 10.0, DFRY4 8.0 and DFRD11 7.0) were selected for further analysis. Acid tolerance, bile tolerance, tolerance to the gastrointestinal tract, antibacterial activity, and antibiotic susceptibility, were tested on the above LAB isolates and isolates obtained earlier such as Bifidobacterium bifidum NCDC229, Lactiplantibacillus plantarum DFR4, Pediococcusacidilactici DFR1 obtained during previous studies in our laboratory. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that Limosilactobacillus fermentum DFRM9 had significantly (p < 0.05) higher probiotic effects among the tested isolates. L.fermentum DFRM9 was used as a starting culture for sauerkraut preparation, and its fermentation activity was compared with that of spontaneous fermentation. The developed functional food was found to have desirable physico-chemical and microbial quality. The results obtained in the present investigation support the use of lacto-fermentation for the production of sauerkraut and indicate the potential of lactic acid bacteria isolated from traditional foods as probiotics in various products.
Although camel milk is generally acknowledged for its nutritional content and medicinal effects, the processing technology and consumer acceptability of its fermented products remain to be improved. This study aimed to evaluate Moroccan consumers’ perception of and intention to consume camel milk fermented with kefir grains and investigate the effect of enrichment with natural date extract on the physicochemical and sensory characteristics of the product. A survey was conducted with 1,009 participants from different regions of Morocco to study consumption habits, knowledge of fermented camel milk products, and the intention to consume kefir-fermented camel milk. In parallel, camel milk formulations fermented with kefir grains, unflavored, flavored with sucrose, and enriched with date extract were developed and characterized through physicochemical analyses, sensory acceptance, and preference tests. Both flavored formulations were standardized to the same soluble solids content (8.13 °Brix), ensuring comparable sweetness during physicochemical and sensory evaluation. The results indicated that information on nutritional benefits positively influenced consumption intention. Enrichment with date extract significantly modified the physicochemical characteristics and improved sensory acceptability compared with that of the sucrose-flavored formulation. These findings indicate that date extract can be used to modify the physicochemical characteristics and improve the sensory acceptance of camel milk kefir while contributing to the valorization of local agri-food resources.
