Evaluation of physicochemical properties of Nile tilapia skin collagen extracted in acid médium.

Tilapia has high-temperature tolerance, can breed in captivity, grow fast, and have excellent cost-benefit. Because of these characteristics, this species is of great interest in aquaculture and, currently, the most produced fish in Brazil. However, by increasing tilapia production, there was also a rise in the amount of organic waste, mainly from filleting, which discards 70% of waste. There are many studies on collagen extraction from tilapia skin as an alternative to reduce these residues and add commercial value. In this work, the extraction of protein concentrate was tested using an acid protocol, in which the tilapia skins underwent a pre-treatment in an acid medium and saline precipitation, with variations in time and concentration. After its extraction, the skin was evaluated for ash, moisture, protein, solubility, and pH. The protein concentrate obtained showed low ash contents, and the humidity is within those presented by the literature. The protein concentrate showed levels from 68.73 to 80.58% of protein and a low solubility between 4.03 to 6.93%. In conclusion, acid extraction is a possible means of collagen extraction, and tilapia skin is a good alternative to reuse waste generated in the fish industry.

Entanglement entropy and entanglement spectrum of triplet topological superconductors.

We analyze the entanglement entropy properties of a 2D p-wave superconductor with Rashba spin-orbit coupling, which displays a rich phase-space that supports non-trivial topological phases, as the chemical potential and the Zeeman term are varied. We show that the entanglement entropy and its derivatives clearly signal the topological transitions and we find numerical evidence that for this model the derivative with respect to the magnetization provides a sensible signature of each topological phase. Following the area law for the entanglement entropy, we systematically analyze the contributions that are proportional to or independent of the perimeter of the system, as a function of the Hamiltonian coupling constants and the geometry of the finite subsystem. For this model, we show that even though the topological entanglement entropy vanishes, it signals the topological phase transitions in a finite system. We also observe a relationship between a topological contribution to the entanglement entropy in a half-cylinder geometry and the number of edge states, and that the entanglement spectrum has robust modes associated with each edge state, as in other topological systems.

Mean-field calculation of critical parameters and log-periodic characterization of an aperiodic-modulated model.

We employ a mean-field approximation to study the Ising model with aperiodic modulation of its interactions in one spatial direction. Two different values for the exchange constant, J(A) and J(B), are present, according to the Fibonacci sequence. We calculate the pseudocritical temperatures for finite systems and extrapolate them to the thermodynamic limit. We explicitly obtain the exponents ß, δ, and γ and, from the usual scaling relations for anisotropic models at the upper critical dimension (assumed to be 4 for the model we treat), we calculate α, ν, ν(∥), η, and η(∥). Within the framework of a renormalization-group approach, the Fibonacci sequence is a marginal one and we obtain exponents that depend on the ratio r≡J(B)/J(A), as expected; however, the scaling relation γ=ß(δ-1) is obeyed for all values of r we studied. We characterize some thermodynamic functions as log-periodic functions of their arguments, as expected for aperiodic-modulated models, and obtain precise values for the exponents from this characterization.