Prolonging the marketing period of peach fruits in Egypt through introducing new cultivars, breaking dormancy early or delaying maturity of some cultivars by safe compounds would increase the growers' profits. This study was conducted during two successive seasons 2005 and 2006 by using "Desert Red" peach cultivar (Prunus persica L.) grafted on Nemaguard rootstock. Trees were grown at El-Noubar...

OBJECTIVE To generate normative data for the phonological and semantic verbal fluency tests (VFT) in Spanish-speaking pediatric populations. METHOD The sample consisted of 4,373 healthy children from nine countries in Latin America (Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Puerto Rico) and Spain. Each participant was administered the VFT as part of a larger neuro...

Risk factors for esophageal adenocarcinoma include obesity, high fat intake, and low consumption of fruits and vegetables. This trial tested whether an intervention to reduce these risk factors in patients with Barrett esophagus, a preneoplastic condition for esophageal adenocarcinoma, could reduce biomarkers of cellular proliferation and, by inference, the risk of neoplastic progression. Eight...

Wild fruits are exotic or underutilized. Wild fruits contain many bioactive compounds, such as anthocyanins and flavonoids. Many studies have shown that wild fruits possess various bioactivities and health benefits, such as free radical scavenging, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and anticancer activity. Therefore, wild fruits have the potential to be developed into functional fo...

Blackberries (Rubus spp.) are among the high added value food products relevant for human health due to the increasing evidence of the beneficial effects of polyphenols, which are very abundant in these fruits. Interestingly, these compounds also play a role on plant physiology, being especially relevant their role in plant defense against biotic and abiotic stress. Hence, we hypothesize that s...

The consumption of alcohol is often accompanied by other foods, such as fruits and vegetables. This study is aimed to investigate the effects of 20 selected fruits on ethanol metabolism to find out their potential health benefits and harmful impacts. The effects of the fruits on ethanol metabolism were characterized by the concentrations of ethanol and acetaldehyde in blood, as well as activiti...

BACKGROUND The ecological factors contributing to the evolution of tropical vertebrate communities are still poorly understood. Primate communities of the tropical Americas have fewer folivorous but more frugivorous genera than tropical regions of the Old World and especially many more frugivorous genera than Madagascar. Reasons for this phenomenon are largely unexplored. We developed the hypot...

The aim of the work reported herein was to determine whether the lack of normal ripening in fruits of rin and nor tomato mutants is due to the presence of ripening inhibitors or to the lack of ripening factors in the fruit. A fruit tissue transplantation technique was developed for this purpose.Disks of pericarp tissue were transplanted reciprocally between tomato fruits (Lycopersicon esculentu...

The effect of the application of 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) and wax emulsions, alone or combined, on composition analysis, vitamin C, polyphenols, and antioxidant capacity of soursop was evaluated. Fruits were stored as follows: at 25 °C (control), and at 16 °C: fruits sprayed with candelilla or flava emulsions, fruits treated with 1500 nL/L of 1-MCP (20 °C, 12 h), and fruits treated with 1-M...

For reducing the post-harvest loss and extension of shelf-life of banana, it is treated with fungicide or combination of fungicide and hot-water treatment. A study was conducted for developing a method to control post-harvest diseases and extension of shelf-life of banana through non-chemical method of hot water treatment. The best treatment combination was found at 53 °C for 9 minutes. Shelf-l...