A real-time PCR assay conjugated with the fluorescent SYBR Green I dye has been developed for rapid, sensitive and quantitative detection of ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma prunorum’ in its natural hosts, in stone fruits such as apricot plants and in the insect vector Cacopsylla pruni. The selected primers amplified specifically a fragment 153 bp long from the rplV (rpl22) gene of ‘Ca. P. prunorum’ and...

Twenty four apricot genotypes with different geographic origins, maintained in the germplasm collections of Central Institute of Temperate Horticulture, Srinagar, India, were studied by means of RAPD markers. The aim of the study was to determine the genetic relationship amongst genetypes from different eco-geographical regions. Fourty three decamer primers were used in the study. All of them w...

The experiment was established at private apricot orchard near Cacak (Western Serbia) during 2010 and 2011. In the present study we wanted to determine the physicochemical attributes, phenolics content and antioxidant capacity of three new Serbian cultivars (‘Aleksandar’, ‘Biljana’, ‘Vera’) grafted on Myrobalan seedlings. Results indicated that physico-chemical attributes significantly varied a...

Activated carbons are extremely versatile adsorbents for major industrial significance, especially for metal ions recovery from wastewaters. In this study, the activated carbon prepared from the hard shell of apricot stones, an agricultural solid, which was used for the gold recovery from gold-plating wastewater is investigated. Activated carbon was produced by chemical activation with phosphor...

In this study, amygdalin contents in the seeds of ten different bitter or sweet apricot cultivars were determined by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for two years. The seeds of apricot cultivars were obtained from the Malatya Fruit Research Institute in Turkey. The results indicated that genetic variation was found among the cultivars. The amygdalin contents of bitter cultivars we...

I develop a novel method to detect election fraud from irregular patterns in the distribution of vote-shares. I build on awidely discussed observation that in some electionswhere fraud allegations abound, suspiciously manypolling stations return coarse vote-shares (e.g., 0.50, 0.60, 0.75) for the rulingparty,which seemshighly implausible in large electorates. Using analytical results and simula...

Modified homotopy perturbation method (HPM) was used to solve the hypersingular integral equations (HSIEs) of the first kind on the interval [-1,1] with the assumption that the kernel of the hypersingular integral is constant on the diagonal of the domain. Existence of inverse of hypersingular integral operator leads to the convergence of HPM in certain cases. Modified HPM and its norm converge...

We study a general class of partially linear transformation models, which extend linear transformation models by incorporating nonlinear covariate effects in survival data analysis. A new martingale-based estimating equation approach, consisting of both global and kernel-weighted local estimation equations, is developed for estimating the parametric and nonparametric covariate effects in a unif...