Sarah M. Durant*†, Meggan E. Craft†, Ray Hilborn, Sultana Bashir, Justin Hando and Len Thomas Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4RY, UK; Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute, Box 661, Arusha, Tanzania; Wildlife Conservation Society, 2300 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY 10460, USA; Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health, College of Medical,...

This work demonstrates that the own plant defence compounds, like resveratrol in grapes, can be used as a natural and ecological alternative to chemical pesticides. An extract from vine leaves was used to maintain the quality of post-harvested grapes. Specifically, an extract (95% water and 5% ethanol) of such leaves was prepared and, subsequently, different bunches of grapes were immersed in i...

Wines and grapes contain a large array of phenolic compounds belonging to non-flavonoids and flavonoids. This study evaluates the polyphenolic contents of six commercial red and white Macedonian wines and four grape varieties. Spectrophotometric methods were applied for the determination of the total phenolics, the total flavonoids, the total anthocyanins and the total catechins. The efficiency...

The characterization of the metabolites accumulated in the grapes of specific cultivars grown in different climates is of particular importance for viticulturists and enologists. In the present study, the metabolite profiling of grapes from the cultivars, Alvarinho, Arinto and Padeiro de Basto, of two Portuguese Controlled Denomination of Origin (DOC) regions (Vinho Verde and Lisboa) was invest...

Wine makers wanting to know about natural fermentations (i.e., those not intentionally inoculated with yeast starter cultures) are interested in the kinds of yeasts present naturally on wine grapes at harvest and which yeasts gain predominance during must fermentation. This information about Arkansas grapes and naturally-fermented musts is not available. Therefore, the objective of this study w...

A basket of grapes painted by Zeuxis more than 2,000 years ago was so realistic, the grapes so enticing, that birds flew down from the sky to peck at the picture, wrote Pliny the Elder in The Natural History. Food imagery, around since antiquity, expanded and flourished during the 17th century, as part of renewed interest in still-life painting in the Netherlands but also among German, French, ...

Biological applications, from genomics to ecology, deal with graphs that represents the structure of interactions. Analyzing such data requires searching for subgraphs in collections of graphs. This task is computationally expensive. Even though multicore architectures, from commodity computers to more advanced symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), offer scalable computing power, currently published...

This paper presents a method for vineyard yield estimation based on the analysis of high-resolution images obtained with artificial illumination at night. First, this paper assesses different pixel-based segmentation methods in order to detect reddish grapes: threshold based, Mahalanobis distance, Bayesian classifier, linear color model segmentation and histogram segmentation, in order to obtai...

Grape must harbors a complex community of yeast species responsible for spontaneous alcoholic fermentation. Although there are detailed studies on the microbiota of Vitis vinifera L. grapes, less is known about the diversity and behavior of yeast communities present on fermenting grape must from other species of Vitis. In this work, we used a culture-dependent method to study the identity and d...

According to the state institute for chemical and veterinary analysis of food, “Conventionally grown wine grapes are one of the crops most extensively treated with pesticides” (CVUA Stuttgart). The use of different fungicides and insecticides is commonplace in vineyards across the world to improve crop yields. Maximum residue levels (MRLs) have been established for grapes in many areas in the w...