Strawberry is one of the most valued fruit worldwide. Modern cultivated varieties (Fragaria × ananassa) exhibit large fruits, with intense color and prolonged shell life. Yet, these valuable traits were attained at the cost of the intensity and the variety of the aroma of the berry, two characteristics highly appreciated by consumers. Wild species display smaller fruits and reduced yield compar...

An amplicon metagenomic approach based on the ITS2 region of fungal rDNA was used to identify the composition of fungal communities associated with different strawberry organs (leaves, flowers, immature and mature fruits), grown on a farm using management practices that entailed the routine use of various chemical pesticides. ITS2 sequences clustered into 316 OTUs and Ascomycota was the dominan...

Proteomic screening of strawberry (Fragaria ananassa) yielded a 58% success rate in protein identification in spite of the fact that no genomic sequence is available for this species. This was achieved by a combination of MALDI-MS/MS de novo sequencing of double-derivatized peptides and indel-tolerant searching against local protein databases built on both EST and full-length nucleotide sequenc...

Strawberry is considered as a salinity sensitive species and is adversely affected in response to the salt stress in terms of growth and yield. Pot experiments were conducted to determine the effect of exogenous salicylic acid (SA) application on physiology, growth, chlorophyll and mineral content of strawberry grown under salt stress and greenhouse conditions. Strawberry plants were treated wi...

Changes in population levels of Meloidogyne hapla, M. incognita, Pratylenchus coffeae, and P. penetrans were studied in 12 strawberry fields in the Dahu region of Taiwan. Ten potential rotation crops and two cultural practices were evaluated for their effect on nematode populations and influence on strawberry yield. Rotation with rice or taro and the cultural practice of flooding and bare fallo...

Heat shock transcription factors (Hsfs) are known to play dominant roles in plant responses to heat, as well as other abiotic or biotic stress stimuli. While the strawberry is an economically important fruit plant, little is known about the Hsf family in the strawberry. To explore the functions of strawberry Hsfs in abiotic and biotic stress responses, this study identified 17 Hsf genes (FvHsfs...

Alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) is a highly attractive plant host to Lygus spp. and is used as a trap crop in California organic strawberries to influence the dispersion and dispersal of these pests, particularly Lygus hesperus Knight. The abundance and distribution of Lygus spp. nymphs between two trap crops separated by 50 strawberry rows was analyzed in 2008 and 2010. Nymphs demonstrated a bimo...

BACKGROUND ABA-, stress- and ripening-induced (ASR) proteins have been reported to act as a downstream component involved in ABA signal transduction. Although much attention has been paid to the roles of ASR in plant development and stress responses, the mechanisms by which ABA regulate fruit ripening at the molecular level are not fully understood. In the present work, a strawberry ASR gene wa...

We studied the effect of two commonly used fungicides on the epiphytic yeast community of strawberry. Greenhouse and field experiments were conducted applying Switch (cyprodinil plus fludioxonil) or Signum (boscalid plus pyraclostrobin) to strawberry plants. Yeasts on leaves and fruits were assessed on treated and untreated plants at several time points via plating and denaturing gradient gel e...

In the present study, a total of 186 bacterial strains isolated from various soil sources and plant species from Eastern Anatolia region in Turkey were evaluated for their ability to suppress gray mold (Botrytis cinerea Pers. ex Fr.) occurred on strawberry cv. Fern. Among 186 bacterial strains, 36 were found effective to inhibit of development B. cinerea under in vitro conditions, and thirteen ...