The application of oxalic acid reduced ethylene production and delayed softening of plum fruit. The inhibition of softening was associated with decreased PG and PME activities; that is, the retardation of pectin solubilization/degradation. During storage or shelf-life,

flesh reddening and anthocyanin synthesis were significantly inhibited in oxalic acid-treated plum fruit, accompanied with decreased PAL activity. Furthermore, it was found that variable:maximalchlorophyll fluorescence (Fv/Fm), an indicator of ripening, senescence or stress injury of fruit and vegetable, decreased much more slowly in oxalic-treated IWR-1-endo price plum fruits than in control fruits. Thus, oxalic acid treatment can be an effective means to extend the shelf life of plum fruit. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Congenital bilateral absence of vas deferens (CBAVD) LCL161 cell line is a manifestation of the

mildest form of cystic fibrosis (CF) and is characterized by obstructive azoospermia in otherwise healthy patients. Owing to the availability of assisted reproductive technology, CBAVD patients can father children. These fathers are at risk of transmitting a mutated allele of the CF transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene, responsible for CF, to their offspring. The identification of mutations in both CFTR alleles in CBAVD patients is a crucial requirement for calculating the risk of producing a child with full-blown CF if the female partner is a healthy CF carrier. However, in the majority of CBAVD patients, conventional mutation screening is not able to detect mutations in both CFTR alleles, and this difficulty hampers the execution of correct genetic counselling. To obtain information about the most represented CFTR mutations in CBAVD patients, we analysed 23 CBAVD patients, 15 of whom had a single CFTR mutation after screening for 36 mutations and the 5T allele. The search for the second CFTR mutation in these cases was performed by using a triplex approach: (i) first, a reverse dot-blot analysis was performed to detect mutations with regional impact; (ii) next, multiple

ligation-dependent probe amplification assays were conducted to search for large rearrangements; and (iii) finally, Quizartinib concentration denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography was used to search for point mutations in the entire coding region. Using these approaches, the second CFTR mutation was detected in six patients, which increased the final detection rate to 60.8%.”
“Days to silking (DTS) is one of the most important traits in maize (Zea mays). To investigate its genetic basis, a recombinant inbred line population was subjected to high and low nitrogen (N) regimes to detect quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with DTS. Three QTLs were identified under the high N regime; these explained 25.4% of the phenotypic variance.