Books published by Mdpi AG

This special edition is based on the annual conference of Sustainable Asia Conference (http://abf.inha.ac.kr/). The purpose of the conference is to work together for our future challenges. Every year more than 50 papers are presented in the conference and published in the special edition of Sustainability. Your participation on the next SAC conference shall greatly enhance our research human network. Once a friend, forever friend, it is our slogan for the conference.

This Special Issue will consist of selected papers from the Sustainable Asia Conference (SAC) 2016, an annual international conference held on Jeju Island, South Korea, from 28 June to 2 July. The SAC 2016 is one of the leading international conferences for presenting novel and fundamental advances in sustainable development issues for Asia. The purpose of the conference is for scientists, scholars, engineers, and students from universities and research institutes around the world to present ongoing research activities so as to promote global research networking in the area of sustainable development. This conference provides opportunities for the delegates to exchange new ideas and application experiences, face-to-face, to establish research or business relations, and to find global partners for future collaborations. The scope of this Special Issue encompasses topics related to sustainable development and management at both the macro- and micro-levels in Northeast Asian countries.

Over the last few years, polyphenol has received a great deal of attention due to their potential beneficial effects on human health. Widely contained in foods commonly consumed in all populations worldwide, polyphenols represent an attractive explanation of the beneficial effects, not only of fruits and vegetables, characteristic components of healthy dietary patterns, but also of other plant-derived foods, such as tea, coffee, and cocoa, which only recently have been exploited as being beneficial for humans. In addition to the numerous biological properties, polyphenols have been indicated as being responsible for a decreased risk of metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. The book addresses original research and reviews of literature concerning polyphenol-rich foods and human health.

Over the last few years, polyphenol has received a great deal of attention due to their potential beneficial effects on human health. Widely contained in foods commonly consumed in all populations worldwide, polyphenols represent an attractive explanation of the beneficial effects, not only of fruits and vegetables, characteristic components of healthy dietary patterns, but also of other plant-derived foods, such as tea, coffee, and cocoa, which only recently have been exploited as being beneficial for humans. In addition to the numerous biological properties, polyphenols have been indicated as being responsible for a decreased risk of metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. The book addresses original research and reviews of literature concerning polyphenol-rich foods and human health.

Human cancers frequently arise from exposure to chemicals, although radiation, oxidation, and genetic factors play critical roles as well. DNA damage by these agents in a cell is an important first step in the process of carcinogenesis. DNA repair processes have evolved to repair these damages. However, the replication of damaged DNA may occur frequently prior to repair, resulting in gene mutations and the generation of altered proteins. Mutations in an oncogene, a tumor-suppressor gene, or a gene that controls the cell cycle give rise to a clonal cell population with an advantage in proliferation. The complex process of carcinogenesis includes many such events, but has been generally considered to be comprised of the three main stages known as initiation, promotion, and progression, which ultimately give rise to the induction of human cancer. The articles published in this book entitled “Chemically-Induced DNA Damage, Mutagenesis, and Cancer” provide an overview on the topic of the “consequence of DNA damage” in the context of human cancer with their challenges and highlights.

Over the last few years, polyphenol has received a great deal of attention due to their potential beneficial effects on human health. Widely contained in foods commonly consumed in all populations worldwide, polyphenols represent an attractive explanation of the beneficial effects, not only of fruits and vegetables, characteristic components of healthy dietary patterns, but also of other plant-derived foods, such as tea, coffee, and cocoa, which only recently have been exploited as being beneficial for humans. In addition to the numerous biological properties, polyphenols have been indicated as being responsible for a decreased risk of metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. The book addresses original research and reviews of literature concerning polyphenol-rich foods and human health.

This edited volume is a collection of 12 publications from esteemed research groups around the globe. The articles belong to the following broad categories: biological treatment process parameters, sludge management and disinfection, removal of trace organic contaminants, removal of heavy metals, and synthesis and fouling control of membranes for wastewater treatment.

Since Langer’s seminal work, polymers have been on every corner of tissue engineering. The roles of bioresorbable polymers, as a scaffold, are not merely structural, providing three-dimensional (3D) homing sites to cells, but also functional at their interface with the cells. The polymeric scaffolds actively act as both biochemical and physical cues for cell behaviors, such as adhesion, growth, proliferation, and differentiation. Polymers and cells could interact further with each other mutually, sensing and responding to the signals from the partner. Technological advances in this direction, including chemical modification of polymer scaffolds, highly cytocompatible hybrid materials/composites, dynamic scaffolds, control of juxtacrine interactions, and 3D bioprinting and microfluidic devices, ensure the advances in polymers as cell scaffolds. The detection and characterization methods for cell-material interactions and cell behaviors have been greatly improved, and new characterization techniques have emerged. Recent years have witnessed a quantum leap of progress in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, and this edited book illustrates some of the advances in polymers as cell scaffolds.

Aptamers are in vitro selected oligonucleotides capable of specific, high-affinity binding to a wide variety of target molecules. These features enable their application in diagnostics, therapeutics, targeted delivery, fluorescence imaging, and biosensing. Aptamers are isolated via the systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX), an iterative cycle of selection and amplification steps that enriches a randomly synthesised oligonucleotide library to a pool of specific, high-affinity aptamers. Since the inception of aptamers in 1990, the methods by which aptamers are selected have been improved, yielding a robust system capable of producing aptamers rapidly and at low cost. Recently, there has been an explosion in the field of aptamers including innovations in enhanced selection strategies, bioinformatics approaches, riboswitches, unnatural base pairs, nucleic acid nanostructures, and DNAzymes.  This book combines excellent reviews with primary research articles to provide multidisciplinary perspectives on the frontiers of aptamer science in 2018.

Thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) is a spectrum of disorders resulting from the compression of the neurovascular structures within the thoracic outlet. The three main subtypes of TOS are defined by the anatomic structure affected by the extrinsic compression. In the most common subtype—neurogenic TOS—the brachial plexus is compressed and symptoms include pain, arm paresthesias, and sometimes weakness. Venous TOS is characterized by the compression of the subclavian vein and its resultant thrombosis. Arterial TOS is the least common and is distinguished by the compression of the subclavian artery and the development of aneurysms or stenoses with distal embolization. Treatment options include physical therapy and surgical first rib resection via the transaxillary or supraclavicular approach. The diagnosis of TOS and appropriate patient selection for intervention are challenging due to the frequent presence of vague symptoms in neurogenic TOS. Due to the relative rarity of this condition, different approaches to diagnosis and management exist, and optimum management strategies continue to evolve.The primary goals of this Special Issue on the “Diagnosis and Treatment of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome” are to describe new and established diagnostic and treatment modalities for TOS; to discuss approaches to complex clinical situations, such as reoperative treatment; and to review new research developments in the field of TOS. 

Using Shannon information theory to analyse the contributions from two source variables to a target, for example, we can measure the information held by one source about the target, the information held by the other source about the target, and the information held by those sources together about the target. Intuitively, however, there is strong desire to measure further notions of how this directed information interaction may be decomposed, e.g., how much information the two source variables hold redundantly about the target, how much each source variable holds uniquely, and how much information can only be discerned by synergistically examining the two sources together.The absence of measures for such decompositions into redundant, unique and synergistic information is arguably the most fundamental missing piece in classical information theory. Triggered by the formulation of the Partial Information Decomposition framework by Williams and Beer in 2010, the past few years have witnessed a concentration of work by the community in proposing, contrasting, and investigating new measures to capture these notions of information decomposition.This Special Issue seeks to bring together these efforts, to capture a snapshot of the current research, as well as to provide impetus for and focused scrutiny on newer work, present progress to the wider community and attract further research. Our contributions present: several new approaches for measures of such decompotions; commentary on properties, interpretations and limitations of such approaches; and applications to empirical data (in particular to neural data). 

Statistical relationships among the variables of a complex system reveal a lot about its physical behavior. Therefore, identification of the relevant variables and characterization of their interactions are crucial for a better understanding of a complex system. Linear methods, such as correlation, are widely used to identify these relationships. However, information-theoretic quantities, such as mutual information and transfer entropy, have been proven to be superior in the case of nonlinear dependencies. Mutual information quantifies the amount of information obtained about one random variable through the other random variable, and it is symmetric. As an asymmetrical measure, transfer entropy quantifies the amount of directed (time-asymmetric) transfer of information between random processes and, thus, it is related to concepts, such as the Granger causality. This Special Issue includes 16 papers elucidating the state of the art of data-based transfer entropy estimation techniques and applications, in areas such as finance, biomedicine, fluid dynamics and cellular automata. Analytical derivations in special cases, improvements on the estimation methods and comparisons between certain techniques are some of the other contributions of this Special Issue. The diversity of approaches and applications makes this book unique as a single source of invaluable contributions from experts in the field.  

Contamination of food and feed products with mycotoxins represent a major threat to human and animal health, and are a significant food safety concern to the worldwide agriculture and food value chain. Due to its high prevalence, costs related to avoiding the occurrence of mycotoxins in food and feed are continuing to rise, causing the international economy to lose billions of dollars every year. The fact is that currently mycotoxin contamination cannot be avoided using the current agricultural practices, therefore, innovative strategies for mitigating mycotoxins are essential and urgently needed. After several decades of research, our understanding of mycotoxin mitigation started to reach a pinnacle and major advances in the control of mycotoxins have been achieved. One of the advances is the development of mycotoxin detoxifications, particularly by biological and enzymatic means. This book covers the most recent advances related to the detoxifications of mycotoxins in food and feed and presents the most promising techniques that may lead to optimized empirical and feasible solutions for controlling mycotoxins in the agriculture and food value chain. The book also provides comprehensive strategies with state-of-the-art tools for future research and development in the field of mycotoxin detoxifications.