Scopo di questa tesi di dottorato è stato quello di monitorare la presenza di micotossine lungo la filiera produttiva del mais. Inizialmente è stata valutata la contaminazione da micotossine della granella di mais, proveniente da due regioni italiane. Le micotossine, la cui presenza era più estesa e rilevante, erano le fumonisine. Sono state indagate le condizioni di umidità e temperatura più favorevoli alla produzione di AFB1 da parte di un ceppo di Aspergillus flavus. L'ibrido DKC5353 ha presentato le minori contaminazioni, in tutte le località in cui è stato coltivato, per quanto riguarda la contaminazione da fumonisine. Tra i vari trattamenti insetticidi e fungicidi testati per l'efficacia nella riduzione della contaminazione da fumonisine, solo uno ha dato riscontro positivo. È stata valutata la ripartizione delle fumonisine nelle frazioni di molitura e nei sottoprodotti della lavorazione dell'olio di mais. Entrambi i processi si sono dimostrati efficaci metodi di decontaminazione. Dalle analisi sulle farine di mais per polenta emerge la necessità di intensificare i controlli e sorvegliare i punti critici del processo di molitura. / The aim of this study was to monitor the occurrence of mycotoxins over productive cycle of maize. Samples of maize kernels, coming from two Italian regions, were analysed to quantify mycotoxins contamination: the mycotoxins, that showed the most widespread and significant occurrence, were fumonisins. The conditions of humidity and temperature, in which an Aspergillus flavus strain produced the greatest quantity of AFB1, were investigated. Considering fumonisins content, hybrid DKC5353 showed the least contaminations, in all places it was grown. Only one of the various insecticide and fungicide treatments tested was effective. The distribution of fumonisins in several milling fractions and by-products of corn oil manufacture: both processes proved successful methods of decontamination. The necessity of increase controls and monitor the critical points of milling process emerged from the analyses on polenta maize flour.

Web 2.0 applications have become ubiquitous over the past few years because they provide useful features such as a rich, responsive graphical user interface that supports interactive and dynamic content. Social networking websites, blogs, auctions, online banking, online shopping and video sharing websites are noteworthy examples of Web 2.0 applications. The market for public cloud service providers is growing rapidly, and cloud providers offer an ever-growing list of services. As a result, developers and researchers find it challenging when deciding which public cloud service to use for deploying, experimenting or testing Web 2.0 applications. This study compares the scalability and performance of a social-events calendar application on two Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud services – Amazon EC2 and HP Cloud. This study captures and compares metrics on three different instance configurations for each cloud service such as the number of concurrent users (load), as well as response time and throughput (performance). Additionally, the total price of the three different instance configurations for each cloud service is calculated and compared. This comparison of the scalability, performance and price metrics provides developers and researchers with an insight into the scalability and performance characteristics of the three instance configurations for each cloud service, which simplifies the process of determining which cloud service and instance configuration to use for deploying their Web 2.0 applications. This study uses CloudStone – an open-source, three-tier web application benchmarking tool that simulates Web 2.0 application activities – as a realistic workload generator and to capture the intended metrics. The comparison of the collected metrics indicate that all of the tested Amazon EC2 instance configurations provide better scalability and lower latency at a lower cost than the respective HP Cloud instance configurations; however, the tested HP Cloud instance configurations provide a greater storage capacity than the Amazon EC2 instance configurations, which is an important consideration for data-intensive Web 2.0 applications.