The enterobacterium Erwinia amylovora is a devastating plant pathogen causing necrotrophic fire blight disease of apple, pear, and other rosaceous plants. In this study, we used a modified in vivo expression technology system to identify E. amylovora genes that are activated during infection of immature pear tissue, a process that requires the major pathogenicity factors of this organism. We id...

Metabolites in the fruits of edible plants include sweet sugars, visually appealing pigments, various products with human nutritional value, and biologically active plant hormones. Although quantities of these metabolites vary during fruit development and ripening because of cell division and enlargement, there are few reports describing the actual dynamics of these changes. Therefore, we appli...

Pear (Pyrus spp) is an important fruit crop, grown in all temperate regions of the world, with global production ranked after grape and apples among deciduous tree crops. A high-density linkage map is a valuable tool for fine mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) and map-based gene cloning. In this study, we firstly constructed a high-density linkage map of pear using SNPs integrated with SSRs,...

conventional methods of pear breeding, largely based on intra- and inter-specific hybridization, are difficult because pear is highly heterozygous, polygenic and has a long juvenile period. genetic improvements of pear cultivars are possible through induction of mutations and gene transfer by genetic engineering. a general prerequisite for these approaches is to establish an efficient plant reg...

Flavonoid biosynthesis profile was clarified by fruit bagging and re-exposure treatments in the green Chinese pear 'Zaosu' (Pyrus bretschneideri Rehd.) and its red mutant 'Red Zaosu'. Two distinct biosynthesis patterns of flavonoid 3-glycosides were found in 'Zaosu' pear. By comparison with 'Red Zaosu', the biosynthesis of flavonoid 3-galactosides and flavonoid 3-arabinosides were inhibited by ...

ABSTRACT The addition of 0.1 mM FeCl(3) to a defined culture medium induces the bacterial epiphyte Pseudomonas fluorescens strain A506 (A506) to produce an antibiotic toxic to the fire blight pathogen, Erwinia amylovora. Consequently, because A506 is registered and applied as a commercial product to suppress E. amylovora before floral infection of pear and apple, the relative availability of ir...

This article is divided into three parts. The first part, the most important one, deals with spectroscopic methods. Different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum are useful for fruit quality characterisation, in particular the visible and near-infrared regions. Concerning the visible one, studies have been carried out on apple, apricot, cherry, mango, peach, red table grape and tomato, when...

To examine the biochemical metabolism of aroma volatiles derived from fatty acids, pear fruits were incubated in vitro with metabolic precursors of these compounds. Aroma volatiles, especially esters, were significantly increased, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in pear fruits fed on fatty acid metabolic precursors. Cultivars having different flavor characteristics had distinctly differe...

Crude wild pear lipoxygenase (LOX) from ripe Kurdistan wild pears was used in this study. Extracted crude LOX was assayed spectrophotometrically for raw, ripe wild pear lipoxygenase and after 7-day storage. The effects of different buffers and pHs, substrate preparations, temperature, inhibitors and metal ions on LOX activity were evaluated at three conditions. The enzyme was most active with H...