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The N-terminal domain of the Pseudomonas sp. FB15 phytase increases low-temperature activity and catalytic efficiency. In this study, the 3D structure of the N-terminal domain was predicted and substitutions for the amino acid residues of the region assumed to be the active site were made. The activity of mutants, in which alanine (A) was substituted for the original residue, was investigated at various temperatures and pH values. Significant differences in enzymatic activity were observed only in mutant E263A, suggesting that the amino acid residue at position 263 of the N-terminal domain is important in enzyme activity.

Corn oil was heated using an infrared cooker, an air fryer, and a cooking oven at similar temperatures, and oxidative stability and physicochemical properties including moisture content, temperature change, the profile of headspace volatiles, formaldehyde and acetaldehyde of the heated oils were compared. Corn oil heated using the air fryer showed the lowest degree of oxidation, followed by that heated using the infrared cooker and the cooking oven. However, the content of headspace volatiles in 120 min heated oil using the infrared cooker was higher by 2.57 and 5.37 times than that in oil heated using the cooking oven and the air fryer, respectively. The profiles of formaldehyde and acetaldehyde in oils showed patterns inconsistent with those of headspace volatile and oxidation parameters. Generally, the air fryer-treated oil underwent slow lipid oxidation, whereas oil from the infrared cooker had more volatiles and imparted odor to foods.

Drought is a major threat worldwide for crop production, especially due to the rapid climate changes. Current drought solutions involve improving irrigation system, rainwater harvesting, damming, cloud seeding, and changes of cultivation methods. Despite effective, each solution has economic, environmental, and temporal drawbacks. Among all solutions, the most effective, inexpensive and manageable method is the use of drought-tolerant cultivars via plant breeding. However, conventional plant breeding is a time-consuming and laborious task, especially for phenotypic data acquisition of target traits of numerous progenies. High-throughput phenotyping (HTP) is a recently developed method and has potential to overcome the mentioned issues. HTP offers massive, accurate, rapid, and automatic data acquisition in the breeding procedure and can be a breakthrough for developing drought resistant/tolerant cultivars. This study introduces various methods of HTP to detect drought stress, which can accelerate the breeding processes of drought-tolerant cultivars to provide helpful guidelines for breeders and researchers to choose appropriate methods.