Berries are gaining increasing importance lately for their chemopreventive and therapeutic potential against several cancers. In earlier studies, a blueberry-supplemented diet has shown protection against 17β-estradiol (E2)-mediated mammary tumorigenesis. This study tested both preventive and therapeutic activities of diet supplemented with whole blueberry powder (50:50 blend of Tifblue and Rub...

Blueberry consumption is associated with health benefits contributing to a reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. The aim of this study was to determine the anthocyanin profile of blueberry extracts and to evaluate their effects on B16-F10 metastatic melanoma murine cells. Seven blueberry cultivars cultivated in Romania were used. The blueberry extracts were purified over...

The advent of affordable Next Generation Sequencing technologies has had major impact on studies of many crop species, where access to genomic technologies and genome-scale data sets has been extremely limited until now. The recent development of genomic resources in blueberry will enable the application of high throughput gene expression approaches that should relatively quickly increase our u...

OBJECTIVE Recent evidence from animals and adult humans has demonstrated potential benefits to cognition from flavonoid supplementation. The aim of this study was to investigate whether these cognitive benefits extended to a sample of school-aged children. METHOD Using a crossover design, with a washout of at least 7 d between drinks, 14 children ages 8 to 10 y consumed either a flavonoid-ric...

BACKGROUND Obesity and Type 2 diabetes have reached epidemic status worldwide. Wild lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium Aiton) is a plant of the North American Aboriginal traditional pharmacopeia with antidiabetic potential, especially when it is fermented with Serratia vaccinii. METHODS A phytochemical fractionation scheme was used to identify potential bioactive compounds as confirme...

Currently, blueberry bruising is evaluated by either human visual/tactile inspection or firmness measurement instruments. These methods are destructive, time-consuming, and subjective. The goal of this paper was to develop a non-destructive approach for blueberry bruising detection and quantification. Experiments were conducted on 300 samples of southern highbush blueberry (Camellia, Rebel, and...

NAFLD model rats were established and divided into NAFLD model (MG group), SIRT1 RNAi (SI group), blueberry juice (BJ group), blueberry juice + bifidobacteria (BJB group), blueberry juice + SIRT1 RNAi (BJSI group), and blueberry juice + bifidobacteria + SIRT1 RNAi groups (BJBSI group). A group with normal rats was a control group (CG). BJB group ameliorated NAFLD, which was better than BJ group...

PURPOSE To explore the effects of the combination of blueberry juice and probiotics on the apoptosis of alcoholic fatty liver disease (AFLD). METHODS Healthy C57BL/6J mice were used in the control group (CG). AFLD mice models were established with Lieber-DeCarli ethanol diet and evenly assigned to six groups with different treatments: MG (model), SI (SIRT1 [sirtuin type 1] small interfering R...

Basal stem rot symptoms were found on blueberry seedlings imported from the United States of America in 2008. The fungus obtained from the diseased seedlings was identified as Calonectria colhounii based on morphological and molecular characteristics. The consignments of the blueberry seedlings infected with C. colhounii were destroyed to prevent introduction of the fungus to Korea.

The Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica, can be a pest of highbush blueberries because of direct feeding on berries and leaves, and the risk of contaminating harvested fruit. To determine where beetles are most abundant and whether cultural controls have potential for use against P. japonica in blueberry, soil was sampled for grubs during 2001 and 2002 in and around fifteen blueberry fields. Den...