BACKGROUND Despite being the second largest tobacco producer in the world, Brazil does not have prevalence studies about green tobacco sickness (GTS). METHODS A cross-sectional study was carried out on a sample of Brazilian tobacco workers. The sample was described according to socio-demographic, behavioral, and occupational variables. Gender-stratified multivariate analyses examined variable...

Heterozygous tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum var. xanthi) plants were cultivated in soil from a dump site highly polluted with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) at Lhenice in South Bohemia, Czech Republic. The total amount of PCBs in the polluted soil, measured by gas chromatography varied from 165 to 265mgkg(-1) of soil. In tobacco plants cultivated for 8 weeks in the polluted soil the amount of PCB...

The' b' protein components specific to virus infected tobacco leaves (Gianinazzi, Martin & Vall~e, 197o) can be partially purified by preferential extraction at pH 2.8. Evidence is presented that they are rich in aromatic amino acids. Results of treatment of the proteins with SDS and subsequent separation by gel electrophoresis in the presence of SDS suggest that b~, b~ and b~ are composed of t...

Under pressure from social criticism and an unclear future, tobacco researchers have begun to seek alternative uses for the product. Here, we present our study on isolating tobacco compounds with fungicidal activity, which could be used as plant-derived pesticides. Using Valsa mali as the target fungus, agar plate tests were conducted to evaluate the fungicidal activity of various tobacco extra...

Background: Rabies virus is a neurotropic virus that causes fatal, but, a preventable disease in mammals. Administration of rabies immunoglobulin (RIG) is essential for the post-exposure of the prophylaxis to prevent the disease. However, replacement of polyclonal RIGs with alternative monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) that are capable of neutralizing rabies virus has been recommend...

A machine vision based approach for classification of tobacco leaves for automatic harvesting in a complex agricultural environment is proposed in this paper. The CIELAB color space model is used to segment the leaf from the background. The segmented leaves are classified into three classes viz., ripe, unripe, and over-ripe. Models based on various textural features such as GLTP (Gray Level Loc...

The preparation, certification, and characterization of two new biological certified reference materials for inorganic trace analysis have been presented. They are based on two different varieties of tobacco leaves, namely, Oriental Basma Tobacco Leaves (INCT-OBTL-5), grown in Greece, and Polish Virginia Tobacco Leaves (INCT-PVTL-6), grown in Poland. Certification of the materials was based on ...

The definition of "minor" veins in leaves is arbitrary and of uncertain biological significance. Generally, the term refers to the smallest vein classes in the leaf, believed to function in phloem loading. We found that a galactinol synthase promoter, cloned from melon (Cucumis melo), directs expression of the gusA gene to the smallest veins of mature Arabidopsis and cultivated tobacco (Nicotia...

In a recent study of N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine (NAPE) metabolism in elicitor-treated tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) cells, we identified a rapid release and accumulation of medium-chain N-acylethanolamines (NAEs) (e.g. N-myristoylethanolamine or NAE 14:0) and a compensatory decrease in cellular NAPE (K.D. Chapman, S. Tripathy, B. Venables, A.D. Desouza [1998] Plant Physiol 116: 1163-1168)....