Eggplant (Solanum melongena) is amenable to grafting and this technique can be exploited to improve production of this vegetable crop. Here, we study the performance of the ‘Cristal F1’ eggplant cultivar grafted onto a total of 17 rootstocks, including five families, each of which is made by two parents and their hybrid, as well a commercial eggplant rootstock and a self-grafted control. Three ...

Whiteflies damage tomatoes mostly via the viruses they transmit. Cultivated tomatoes lack many of the resistances of their wild relatives. In order to increase protection to its major pest, the whitefly Bemisia tabaci and its transmitted Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus (TYLCV), we introgressed a trichome-based resistance trait from the wild tomato Solanum pimpinellifolium into cultivated tomato, ...

The study of tomato fruit set and early fruit development is of upmost importance due to their economic implications for crop production. Moreover, they are good subjects in the attempt to understand plant development control. In this work, we isolated more than 400 genes that are differentially expressed during these processes in tomato by using two complementary approaches: suppressive subtra...

The systemic model for floral induction, dubbed florigen, was conceived in photoperiod-sensitive plants but implies, in its ultimate form, a graft-transmissible signal that, although activated by different stimuli in different flowering systems, is common to all plants. We show that SFT (SINGLE-FLOWER TRUSS), the tomato ortholog of FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT), induces flowering in day-neutral tomato...

Organically grown products experienced a doubling in percent penetration of organic sales into retail markets during the period from 1997 to 2003; however, there is still a debate over the perceived quality advantage of organically grown fruits and vegetables. In a study focusing on commercial production of processing tomatoes, samples were analyzed from 4 growers with matched organic and conve...

The most effective soil fumigant for the past 40 years for preplant chemical control of nematodes, weeds, and fungal pathogens in Florida vegetable production has been methyl bromide (MBr). Unfortunately, MBr has been implicated in depletion of stratospheric ozone, and is slated to be banned in the United States. A possible alternative replacement to MBr is metam sodium (MS, sodium N-methyl dit...

background: plants are among promising and suitable platform systems for production of recombinant biopharmaceutical proteins due to several features such as safety, no need for fermentation, inexpensive investment, and fast and easy scale-up. human insulin is one of the most widely used medicines in the world. up to now different expression systems including escherichia coli, yeast and cho hav...

Fusarium wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. Lycopersici is one of the major obstacles to the production of tomato which causes huge losses in tomato products worldwide. In order to increase the tolerance to this disease, a triple structure containing PR1, chitinase and glucanase genes controlled by 35S promoter was transferred to tomato. Eight days after planting on pre-culture me...

The interaction between phytochrome photoequilibrium (phi) and photon flux in the photoregulation of anthocyanin production under prolonged irradiation was studied in seedlings of Brassica oleracea L. and Lycopersicon esculentum Mill. In cabbage, anthocyanin production increases with decreasing phi, reaching a maximum at the lowest value (phi = 0.13) used in this study; in tomato, the extent of...