Avocado fruits will not ripen while attached to the tree. This is a definite advantage to the grower, the packinghouse operator, the shipper and the retailer, because the harvest period can be extended over a comparative long period and at all stages of handling the fruit are firm, therefore less susceptible to mechanical damage. However, the consumer is normally confronted with hard inedible a...

The effects of land management including sugarcane, horticultural crops (citrus, avocado and banana), forestry (gum, wattle and pine), kikuyu pasture, native forest and native grassland on the size and composition of the earthworm community on sugarcane estates in northern KwaZulu-Natal was investigated. Earthworm numbers followed the order: burnt sugarcane < trashed sugarcane = grassveld = gum...

AIMS To screen for Bacillus thuringiensis strains from avocado orchards in two Mexican states with lepidopteran-specific cry gene content and evaluate their insecticidal activity against Argyrotaenia sp., an undescribed species present in avocado orchards. METHODS AND RESULTS Lepidopteran-active cry1, cry2 and cry9 genes were detected by PCR analysis in 37 isolates. cry1 genes were more frequ...

The aim of this study was to subtype Listeria monocytogenes strains present in an avocado processing facility using polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLPs) and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). The inlA gene of the L. monocytogenes isolates was PCR amplified and cut with the restriction endonuclease AluI or Tsp509I. Initial investigation of 64 L. ...

A 10-wk study of the avocado seed-feeding moth Stenoma catenifer Walsingham (Lepidoptera: Elachistidae), was conducted in a commercial 'Hass' avocado (Persea americana Miller [Lauraceae]) orchard in Guatemala. Up to 45% of fruit in the orchard were damaged by larval S. catenifer. Larval-to-adult survivorship for 1,881 S. catenifer larvae in Hass fruit was 37%, and adult sex ratio was 51% female...

The mitochondrial lipids from avocado fruit, cauliflower buds, and potato tubers, and the lipids of chloroplasts isolated from avocado fruit and from cauliflower leaves were identified and the concentrations were determined. The lipid composition was compared with that of beef heart mitochondria. Phospholipids constituted 50-56% of total lipids in plant mitochondria while this fraction made up ...

BACKGROUND Avocado/soybean unsaponifiables such as Arthrocen have been reported to reduce cartilage catabolism and chondrocytic synthesis of inflammatory mediators associated with osteoarthritis (OA). While there is some clinical evidence that avocado/soybean unsaponifiables can reduce OA pain, no preclinical studies have corroborated this observation. The present study determined whether addit...

Cell-free systems that catalyze the condensation of acetylcoenzyme A to form long chain fatty acids have been prepared from chicken liver by Wakil et al. (l), from yeast by Lynen (2), and from rat liver and brain by Brady, Bradley, and Trams (3, 4). In 1957, Stumpf and Barber (5) described a mitochondrial system isolated from avocado mesocarp that incorporated (Y-acetate into long chain fatty a...

The effect of 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 ppm of ethylene, applied for 3, 6, 12, and 24 hours, on the ripening rate of "Hass" avocado (Persea americana Mill.) fruits at three stages of maturity was investigated. Ethylene treatments were started either immediately after picking or 2 days later. A sharp peak of ethylene production was found to precede full softening by about 2 days and the occurrence o...

In this paper, we present an empirical study of email classification into two main categories “Business” and “Personal”. We train on the Enron email corpus, and test on the Enron and Avocado email corpora. We show that information from the email exchange networks improves the performance of classification. We represent the email exchange networks as social networks with graph structures. For th...