Características da variedade Fremont quando comparadas com as das tangerinas 'Ponkan' e 'Clementina Nules'

O quadro varietal das tangerinas plantadas comercialmente é bastante restrito, concentrando-se na tangerina 'Ponkan' e no tangor 'Murcott'. Aumentar o número de variedades, assim como ampliar o período de safra são fatores importantes tendo em vista que trarão vantagens ao consumidor e ao produtor desse grupo de citros. No período de 2002 a 2005, foram estudadas as características da variedade Fremont e comparadas com as tangerinas 'Ponkan' e 'Clementina Nules', no município de Capão Bonito-SP. Pode-se concluir, dos resultados obtidos, que as plantas da tangerina Fremont são de porte reduzido (semi-anãs); os frutos apresentam características excepcionais para consumo in natura, maturação de meia-estação e período de colheita, que se estende por até três meses, sendo dessa maneira boa opção para plantios visando à entressafra da 'Ponkan'.

The ideal table grapes for the Spanish market

This paper seeks to explore a survey of consumers in Spain. The survey explores the attributes of quality that consumers are seeking and promotion of grapes via "quality" marks, which are indicators of possible ways to increase demand. The reason consumers are switching to other foods, such as dairy based snacks, is that grapes are not easy to eat, can be unreliable in terms of their quality attributes, and their price more variable. Consumers are also generally unaware of the marks quality currently used.

Modulation of genetic associations with serum urate levels by body-mass-index in humans.

We tested for interactions between body mass index (BMI) and common genetic variants affecting serum urate levels, genome-wide, in up to 42569 participants. Both stratified genome-wide association (GWAS) analyses, in lean, overweight and obese individuals, and regression-type analyses in a non BMI-stratified overall sample were performed. The former did not uncover any novel locus with a major main effect, but supported modulation of effects for some known and potentially new urate loci. The latter highlighted a SNP at RBFOX3 reaching genome-wide significant level (effect size 0.014, 95% CI 0.008-0.02, Pinter= 2.6 x 10-8). Two top loci in interaction term analyses, RBFOX3 and ERO1LB-EDARADD, also displayed suggestive differences in main effect size between the lean and obese strata. All top ranking loci for urate effect differences between BMI categories were novel and most had small magnitude but opposite direction effects between strata. They include the locus RBMS1-TANK (men, Pdifflean-overweight= 4.7 x 10-8), a region that has been associated with several obesity related traits, and TSPYL5 (men, Pdifflean-overweight= 9.1 x 10-8), regulating adipocytes-produced estradiol. The top-ranking known urate loci was ABCG2, the strongest known gout risk locus, with an effect halved in obese compared to lean men (Pdifflean-obese= 2 x 10-4). Finally, pathway analysis suggested a role for N-glycan biosynthesis as a prominent urate-associated pathway in the lean stratum. These results illustrate a potentially powerful way to monitor changes occurring in obesogenic environment.

Cell cycle regulation of mitochondrial function.

Specific cellular functions, such as proliferation, survival, growth, or senescence, require a particular adaptive metabolic response, which is fine tuned by members of the cell cycle regulators families. Currently, proteins such as cyclins, CDKs, or E2Fs are being studied in the context of cell proliferation and survival, cell signaling, cell cycle regulation, and cancer. We show in this review that cellular, animal and molecular studies provided enough evidence to prove that these factors play, in addition, crucial roles in the control of mitochondrial function; finally resulting in a dual proliferative and metabolic response.

Evaluación del nivel de aceptabilidad para las variedades Italia, Napoleón y Redglobe en el mercado español

Con el objetivo de evaluar el nivel de aceptabilidad para tres variedades tardías de uva de mesa, la Unidad de Comercialización y Divulgación Agraria del Departamento de Economía y Ciencias Sociales Agrarias (E.T.S.I.Agrónomos), de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, realizó la presente investigación en octubre de 1999. Se utilizó el análisis sensorial en Sala de Catas como herramienta para la evaluación del nivel de aceptabilidad de tres variedades de uva de mesa. Se puso énfasis en conocer las posibles diferencias de carácter sensorial entre las variedades Itália, Redglobe y Napoleón, variedades que coinciden en su época de cosecha y comercialización en España. En los análisis hechos, la variedad Itália fue la más preferida. El sabor, seguido de la jugosidad, fueron los elementos determinantes en el proceso de aceptación de la uva.

Loss of the RNA polymerase III repressor MAF1 confers obesity resistance.

MAF1 is a global repressor of RNA polymerase III transcription that regulates the expression of highly abundant noncoding RNAs in response to nutrient availability and cellular stress. Thus, MAF1 function is thought to be important for metabolic economy. Here we show that a whole-body knockout of Maf1 in mice confers resistance to diet-induced obesity and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease by reducing food intake and increasing metabolic inefficiency. Energy expenditure in Maf1(-/-) mice is increased by several mechanisms. Precursor tRNA synthesis was increased in multiple tissues without significant effects on mature tRNA levels, implying increased turnover in a futile tRNA cycle. Elevated futile cycling of hepatic lipids was also observed. Metabolite profiling of the liver and skeletal muscle revealed elevated levels of many amino acids and spermidine, which links the induction of autophagy in Maf1(-/-) mice with their extended life span. The increase in spermidine was accompanied by reduced levels of nicotinamide N-methyltransferase, which promotes polyamine synthesis, enables nicotinamide salvage to regenerate NAD(+), and is associated with obesity resistance. Consistent with this, NAD(+) levels were increased in muscle. The importance of MAF1 for metabolic economy reveals the potential for MAF1 modulators to protect against obesity and its harmful consequences.

Biotechnology applied to Annona species: a review

Annonaceae is an ancient family of plants including approximately 50 genera growing worldwide in a quite restricted area with specific agroclimatic requirements. Only few species of this family has been cultivated and exploited commercially and most of them belonging to the genus Annona such as A. muricata, A. squamosa, the hybrid A. cherimola x A. squamosa and specially Annona cherimola: the cherimoya, commercially cultivated in Spain, Chile, California, Florida, México, Australia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, New Zealand and several countries in South and Central America. The cherimoya shows a high degree of heterozygosis, and to obtain homogeneous and productive orchards it is necessary to avoid the propagation by seeds of this species. Additionally, the traditional methods of vegetative propagation were inefficient and inadequate, due to the low morphogenetic potential of this species, and the low rooting rate. The in vitro tissue culture methods of micropropagation can be applied successfully to cherimoya and other Annona sp to overcome these problems. Most of the protocols of micropropagation and regeneration were developed using the cultivar Fino de Jete, which is the major cultivar in Spain. First it is developed the method to micropropagate the juvenile material of cherimoya (ENCINA et al., 1994), and later it was optimized a protocol to micropropagate adult cherimoya genotypes selected by outstanding agronomical traits (PADILLA and ENCINA, 2004) and further it was improved the process through micrografting (PADILLA and ENCINA, 2011).At the present time we are involved in inducing and obtaining new elite genotypes, as part of a breeding program for the cherimoya and other Annonas, using and optimizing different methodologies in vitro: a) Adventitious organogenesis and regeneration from cellular cultures (ENCINA, 2004), b) Ploidy manipulation of the cherimoya, to obtain haploid, tetraploid and triploid plants (seedless), c) Genetic transformation, for the genes introduction to control the postharvest processes and the genes introduction to provide resistance to pathogen and insects and d) Micropropagation and regeneration of other wild Annona or related Annonaceae species such as: Annona senegalensis, A. scleroderma, A. montana, A. reticulata, A. glabra, A. diversifolia and Rollinia sp.

Alzheimer Disease Diagnosis based on Automatic Spontaneous Speech Analysis

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most prevalent form of progressive degenerative dementia and it has a high socio-economic impact in Western countries, therefore is one of the most active research areas today. Its diagnosis is sometimes made by excluding other dementias, and definitive confirmation must be done trough a post-mortem study of the brain tissue of the patient. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to improvement of early diagnosis of AD and its degree of severity, from an automatic analysis performed by non-invasive intelligent methods. The methods selected in this case are Automatic Spontaneous Speech Analysis (ASSA) and Emotional Temperature (ET), that have the great advantage of being non invasive, low cost and without any side effects.

Spontaneous Speech and Emotional Response modeling based on One-class classifier oriented to Alzheimer Disease diagnosis

The purpose of our project is to contribute to earlier diagnosis of AD and better estimates of its severity by using automatic analysis performed through new biomarkers extracted from non-invasive intelligent methods. The methods selected in this case are speech biomarkers oriented to Sponta-neous Speech and Emotional Response Analysis. Thus the main goal of the present work is feature search in Spontaneous Speech oriented to pre-clinical evaluation for the definition of test for AD diagnosis by One-class classifier. One-class classifi-cation problem differs from multi-class classifier in one essen-tial aspect. In one-class classification it is assumed that only information of one of the classes, the target class, is available. In this work we explore the problem of imbalanced datasets that is particularly crucial in applications where the goal is to maximize recognition of the minority class as in medical diag-nosis. The use of information about outlier and Fractal Dimen-sion features improves the system performance.

Online drawings for dementia diagnose: in-air and pressure information analysis

In this paper we present experimental results comparing on-line drawings for control population (left and right hand) as well as Alzheimer disease patients. The drawings have been acquired by means of a digitizing tablet, which acquires time information angles and pressures. Experimental measures based on pressure and in-air movements appear to be significantly different for both groups, even when control population performs the tasks with the non-dominant hand.

Identification of two novel mutations in CDHR1 in consanguineous Spanish families with autosomal recessive retinal dystrophy.

Inherited retinal dystrophies present extensive phenotypic and genetic heterogeneity, posing a challenge for patients' molecular and clinical diagnoses. In this study, we wanted to clinically characterize and investigate the molecular etiology of an atypical form of autosomal recessive retinal dystrophy in two consanguineous Spanish families. Affected members of the respective families exhibited an array of clinical features including reduced visual acuity, photophobia, defective color vision, reduced or absent ERG responses, macular atrophy and pigmentary deposits in the peripheral retina. Genetic investigation included autozygosity mapping coupled with exome sequencing in the first family, whereas autozygome-guided candidate gene screening was performed by means of Sanger DNA sequencing in the second family. Our approach revealed nucleotide changes in CDHR1; a homozygous missense variant (c.1720C > G, p.P574A) and a homozygous single base transition (c.1485 + 2T > C) affecting the canonical 5' splice site of intron 13, respectively. Both changes co-segregated with the disease and were absent among cohorts of unrelated control individuals. To date, only five mutations in CDHR1 have been identified, all resulting in premature stop codons leading to mRNA nonsense mediated decay. Our work reports two previously unidentified homozygous mutations in CDHR1 further expanding the mutational spectrum of this gene.