The bran fraction of wheat grain is known to contain significant quantities of bioactive components. This study evaluated the potential of solid-state yeast fermentation to improve the health beneficial properties of wheat bran, including extractable antioxidant properties, protein contents, and soluble and insoluble fiber compositions. Three commercial food grade yeast preparations were evaluated in the study along with the effects of yeast dose, treatment time, and their interaction with the beneficial components. Solid-state yeast treatments were able to significantly increase releasable antioxidant properties ranging from 28 to 65, from 0 to 20, from 13 to 19, from 0 to 25, from 50 to 100, and from 3 to 333% for scavenging capacities against peroxyl (ORAC), ABTS cation, DPPH and hydroxyl radicals, total phenolic contents (TPC), and phenolic acids, respectively. Yeast treatment increased protein content 11-12% but did not significantly alter the fiber composition of wheat bran. Effects of solid-state yeast treatment on both ORAC and TPC of wheat bran were altered by yeast dose, treatment time, and their interaction. Results suggest that solid-state yeast treatment may be a commercially viable postharvest procedure for improving the health beneficial properties of wheat bran and other wheat-based food ingredients.

It is known that every complex square matrix with nonnega-tive determinant is the product of positive semi-definite matrices. There are characterizations of matrices that require two or five positive semi-definite matrices in the product. However, the characterizations of matrices that require three or four positive semi-definite matrices in the product are lacking. In this paper, we give a complete characterization of these two types of matrices. With these results, we give an algorithm to determine whether a square matrix can be expressed as the product of kpositive semi-definite matrices but not fewer, for k=1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

We show that if X is a uniformly perfect complete metric space satisfying the finite doubling property, then there exists a fully supported measure with lower regularity dimension as close to the lower dimension of X as we wish. Furthermore, we show that, under the condensation open set condition, the lower dimension of an inhomogeneous self-similar set EC coincides with the lower dimension of the condensation set C, while the Assouad dimension of EC is the maximum of the Assouad dimensions of the corresponding self-similar set E and the condensation set C. If the Assouad dimension of C is strictly smaller than the Assouad dimension of E, then the upper regularity dimension of any measure supported on EC is strictly larger than the Assouad dimension of EC. Surprisingly, the corresponding statement for the lower regularity dimension fails. 1