Salmonella remains a leading cause of bacterial food-borne disease, sickening millions each year. Although outbreaks of salmonellosis have traditionally been associated with contaminated meat products, recent years have seen numerous disease cases caused by the consumption of produce. Tomatoes have been specifically implicated, due to the ability of Salmonella spp. to enter the tomato fruit and...

Standard colour measurements can pose a serious problem for interpretation. For tomatoes the maturity at harvest does affect the colour that can maximally be obtained during postharvest storage. For more mature fruit up to 2 units (compared to 18 units tops) were found. This effect was ascribed to the level of a precursor produced during growth. More mature fruit also exhibit a more pronounced ...

Tomatoes are one of the most nutritionally and economically important crops in New Zealand and around the world. Tomatoes require large amounts of water to grow well and are adversely affected by drought stress. However, few studies have evaluated the physicochemical characteristics of commercial tomatoes grown under water stress conditions. Four tomato cultivars (Incas, Marmande, Scoresby Dwar...

Carotenoids are essential for plant and animal nutrition, and are important factors in the variation of pigmentation in fruits, leaves, and flowers. Tomato is a model crop for studying the biology and biotechnology of fleshy fruits, particularly for understanding carotenoid biosynthesis. In commercial tomato cultivars and germplasms, visual phenotyping of the colors of ripe fruits can be done e...

MAIN OBJECTIVES Fresh fruits and vegetables become increasingly recognized as vehicles of human salmonellosis. Physiological, ecological, and environmental factors are all thought to contribute to the ability of Salmonella to colonize fruits and vegetables pre- and post-harvest. The goal of this study was to test how irrigation levels, fruit water congestion, crop and pathogen genotypes affect ...

UNLABELLED The characteristics of tomato pericarp are closely associated with peelabililty, an important quality attribute of processing tomatoes. Different types of tissue exist in the pericarp of tomato. The outermost region of the pericarp, the red layer, is removed with the skin during peeling. This study investigated the morphological features and tissue properties of red layer and pericar...

Salmonella enterica has been frequently linked to major foodborne disease outbreaks. The molecular mechanisms underlying this pathogen survival on the fresh fruit surface remain largely unexplored. In this study, the environmental factors that affect the survival of Salmonella strains on the surface of selected fruits were studied. Grape tomatoes (or cantaloupe peels) were inoculated in three s...

In this paper, we present a complete system to monitor the growth of tomatoes from images acquired in open fields. This is a challenging task because of the severe occlusion and poor contrast in the images. We approximate the tomatoes by spheres in the 3D space, hence by ellipses in the image space. The tomatoes are first identified in the images using a segmentation procedure. Then, the size o...

Using data on individual consumption expenditures from a sample of farm households in the Philippines, we construct a direct test of the unitary household model. We are able to contrast the efficient outcomes predicted by the unitary household model with the constrained efficient outcomes we might expect if there was a hidden action problem within the household; in the latter case, household me...

The epidemiologic literature in the English language regarding intake of tomatoes and tomato-based products and blood lycopene (a compound derived predominantly from tomatoes) level in relation to the risk of various cancers was reviewed. Among 72 studies identified, 57 reported inverse associations between tomato intake or blood lycopene level and the risk of cancer at a defined anatomic site;...