Regeneration and characterization of somatic hybrids combining sweet orange and mandarin/mandarin hybrid cultivars for citrus scion improvement

Protoplast fusion between sweet orange and mandarin/mandarin hybrids scion cultivars was performed following the model "diploid embryogenic callus protoplast + diploid mesophyll-derived protoplast". Protoplasts were isolated from embryogenic calli of 'Pera' and 'Westin' sweet orange cultivars (Citrus sinensis) and from young leaves of 'Fremont', Nules', and 'Thomas' mandarins (C. reticulata), and 'Nova' tangelo [C. reticulata x (C. paradisi x C. reticulata)]. The regenerated plants were characterized based on their leaf morphology (thickness), ploidy level, and simple sequence repeat (SSR) molecular markers. Plants were successfully generated only when 'Pera' sweet orange was used as the embryogenic parent. Fifteen plants were regenerated being 7 tetraploid and 8 diploid. Based on SSR molecular markers analyses all 7 tetraploid regenerated plants revealed to be allotetraploids (somatic hybrids), including 2 from the combination of 'Pera' sweet orange + 'Fremont' mandarin, 3 'Pera' sweet orange + 'Nules' mandarin, and 2 'Pera' sweet orange + 'Nova' tangelo, and all the diploid regenerated plants showed the 'Pera' sweet orange marker profile. Somatic hybrids were inoculated with Alternaria alternata and no disease symptoms were detected 96 h post-inoculation. This hybrid material has the potential to be used as a tetraploid parent in interploid crosses for citrus scion breeding.

CONTEXT TREE SELECTION AND LINGUISTIC RHYTHM RETRIEVAL FROM WRITTEN TEXTS

The starting point of this article is the question "How to retrieve fingerprints of rhythm in written texts?" We address this problem in the case of Brazilian and European Portuguese. These two dialects of Modern Portuguese share the same lexicon and most of the sentences they produce are superficially identical. Yet they are conjectured, on linguistic grounds, to implement different rhythms. We show that this linguistic question can be formulated as a problem of model selection in the class of variable length Markov chains. To carry on this approach, we compare texts from European and Brazilian Portuguese. These texts are previously encoded according to some basic rhythmic features of the sentences which can be automatically retrieved. This is an entirely new approach from the linguistic point of view. Our statistical contribution is the introduction of the smallest maximizer criterion which is a constant free procedure for model selection. As a by-product, this provides a solution for the problem of optimal choice of the penalty constant when using the BIC to select a variable length Markov chain. Besides proving the consistency of the smallest maximizer criterion when the sample size diverges, we also make a simulation study comparing our approach with both the standard BIC selection and the Peres-Shields order estimation. Applied to the linguistic sample constituted for our case study, the smallest maximizer criterion assigns different context-tree models to the two dialects of Portuguese. The features of the selected models are compatible with current conjectures discussed in the linguistic literature.

Antioxidant capacity and mineral content of pulp and peel from commercial cultivars of citrus from Brazil

Four Citrus species (C. sinensis, cvs. Pera and Lima; C. latifolia Tanaka cv. Tahiti; C limettioides Tanaka cv. Sweet lime and C. reticulate, cv. Ponkan) grown in Brazil were characterised in relation to contents of minerals, ascorbic acid, total polyphenols and antioxidant capacity of pulps and peels. In general, the peels demonstrated significantly higher contents of all compounds than the pulps (p < 0.05), with the exception of the Pera orange pulp that presented the highest acid ascorbic content (68 mg/100 ml), while the Tahiti lime peel presented the lowest (8 mg/100 g). Citrus showed high levels of potassium, calcium and magnesium, and the peels were considered sources of these minerals. The Ponkan mandarin peel presented the highest antioxidant capacity. The antioxidant capacity of citrus was correlated both to vitamin C and phenolics. Aside from citrus pulps, the peels are also good sources of bioactive compounds and minerals, and can be explored for their health promoting values in food products. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.