scholarly journals Leaf shape is a predictor of fruit quality and cultivar performance in tomato

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven D. Rowland ◽  
Kristina Zumstein ◽  
Hokuto Nakayama ◽  
Zizhang Cheng ◽  
Amber M. Flores ◽  
...  

SummaryCommercial tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is one of the most widely grown vegetable crops worldwide. Heirloom tomatoes retain extensive genetic diversity and a considerable range of fruit quality and leaf morphological traits.Here the role of leaf morphology was investigated for its impact on fruit quality. Heirloom cultivars were grown in field conditions and BRIX by Yield (BY) and other traits measured over a fourteen-week period. The complex relationships among these morphological and physiological traits were evaluated using PLS-Path Modeling, and a consensus model developed.Photosynthesis contributed strongly to vegetative biomass and sugar content of fruits but had a negative impact on yield. Conversely leaf shape, specifically rounder leaves, had a strong positive impact on both fruit sugar content and yield. Cultivars such as Stupice and Glacier, with very round leaves, had the highest performance in both fruit sugar and yield. Our model accurately predicted BY for two commercial cultivars using leaf shape data as input.This study revealed the importance of leaf shape to fruit quality in tomato, with rounder leaves having significantly improved fruit quality. This correlation was maintained across a range of diverse genetic backgrounds and shows the importance of leaf morphology in tomato crop improvement.

Molecules ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (17) ◽  
pp. 3030 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónica Carolina Morales-Espinoza ◽  
Gregorio Cadenas-Pliego ◽  
Marissa Pérez-Alvarez ◽  
Alma Delia Hernández-Fuentes ◽  
Marcelino Cabrera de la Fuente ◽  
...  

Nanotechnology represents an opportunity to improve the use of elements in agriculture. Selenium is an element that is beneficial to plants and essential to the human diet. The size of nanoparticles gives them characteristics that can enhance the benefits that selenium provides to plants. The objective of the present study was to determine the effects of selenium nanoparticles on the growth, antioxidant responses, and fruit quality of tomato developed under NaCl stress. Four doses of selenium nanoparticles (1, 5, 10, and 20 mg L−1) under NaCl stress, only NaCl, and a control were evaluated. The results showed that the impact of salinity on the growth of the tomato crop can be reduced with the application of selenium nanoparticles. However, the amount of both enzymatic and non-enzymatic compounds significantly increased in the leaves and fruits of tomato. The results suggest that the application of selenium nanoparticles generated a positive effect against salinity in the tomato crop; moreover, it had a positive impact on the content of beneficial biocompounds for human health in tomato fruits.


1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mochamad Iskarim

Penelitian ini dimaksudkan untuk mengetahui dampak positif dan negatif dari adanya pergantian (turn-over) guru di Madrasah Aliyah Nahdlatul Ulama Banyuputih kabupaten Batang. Penelitian inimenggunakan pendekatan kualitatif deskriptif analitis dengan metode pengumpulan data berupa wawancara mendalam, angket, dan dokumentasi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan adanya turn-over yang tinggi pada guru atau pendidik di madrasah tersebut; keuntungan yang bersifat positif justru didapatkan ketika adanya turn-over guru dibandingkan dampak negatifnya; dan kehadiran guru baru menjadi hal yang sangat disukai oleh siswa dalam hal kreativitas, inovasi pembelajaran, motivasi, dan lain sebagainya.The aims of this research were to know the positive and negative impact of teacher turn over at Madrasah Aliyah Nahdlatul Ulama Banyuputih Kabupaten Batang. This research was use analytical descriptive qualitative approach with depth interview, questionnaire and documentation as data collection methods. The results of this research shows that the positive impact occur more than the negative impact when there was teacher turn over; and the presence of a new teacher become student’s favourite on creativity, learning innovation, and motivation aspects.


Author(s):  
Dorin Sora ◽  
Mădălina Doltu

This study aimed to identification of an ecological alternative for the chemical disinfection of soil in the greenhouses from Romania. Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is one of the most popular vegetable crops in the world. The carbohydrate, vitamins, salts of important mineral elements and organic acids content of tomato fruits is very important. Tomato crops are very sensitive to climatic vagaries, so fluctuation in climatic parameters at any phase of growth can affect the yield and the fruit quality. Grafting on Solanaceae is a method which has improved and spread quickly during the past years, a similar approach to crop rotation, a practice meant to increase productivity, resistance or tolerance to biotic and abiotic stress factors and at increasing fruit quality. The research was conducted in a glass greenhouse of the Horting Institute, Bucharest, Romania. The biological material used was a Romanian tomato hybrid (Siriana F1), a Dutch tomato hybrid (Abellus F1) and four rootstocks, a Dutch tomato hybrid (Emperador F1) and three Romanian tomato cultivars (L542, L543 and L544) obtained from the Research and Development Station for Vegetable Growing, Buzău, Romania. The rootstocks have had resistance to biotic stress factors (soil diseases and pests) and the chemical disinfection of soil has was eliminated. The result of this research are presented in this paper.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Jones

This chapter examines the scaling and diffusion of green entrepreneurship between 1980 and the present. It explores how entrepreneurs and business leaders promoted the idea that business and sustainability were compatible. It then examines the rapid growth of organic foods, natural beauty, ecological architecture, and eco-tourism. Green firms sometimes grew to a large scale, such as the retailer Whole Foods Market in the United States. The chapter explores how greater mainstreaming of these businesses resulted in a new set of challenges arising from scaling. Organic food was now transported across large distances causing a negative impact on carbon emissions. More eco-tourism resulted in more air travel and bigger airports. In other industries scaling had a more positive impact. Towns were major polluters, so more ecological buildings had a positive impact.


Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 118
Author(s):  
Lunel Joseph ◽  
Raúl Marino Yaranga Cano ◽  
Marco Arizapana-Almonacid ◽  
Marcela Venelli Pyles ◽  
Flávia Freire de Siqueira ◽  
...  

Research Highlights: Families more dependent on crops as the main source of income of properties have a greater intention of restoring Polylepis forest areas. However, this intention reduces with the increase of family dependence on subsistence products supplied by Polylepis forests. Properties where the chances of restoration of Polylepis forests are greater are those where the educational and technical level is better. Objectives: We aimed to comprehend which socioeconomic factors of rural properties and families’ perception were determinant for the intention to restore Polylepis forests in the Central Andes region of Peru. Material and Methods: We collected data through visits and the application of questionnaires. We selected 13 rural communities in the Tulumayo River Basin. We randomly sampled 10 to 20 families in each community, depending on its size, totaling 200 families. We used generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) to test which variables affect the intention to restore the forest. Results: When crops are the main source of income in the property, the families have more intention to restore Polylepis areas, on the other hand, when Polylepis forests are an important source of products for the family subsistence, the intention to restore forests reduces, indicating that higher technological status has a positive impact on restoration. The perception that Polylepis forests are important for the existence of water sources had a positive impact on the families’ intention to restore the areas. However, the perception that Polylepis forests are important for native flora persistence had a negative impact on the intention to restore their areas. Conclusions: Our results showed that investment in improving the productivity of the properties and in the education of their landowners should increase the success of eventual programs for restoration of Polylepis forests.


SLEEP ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (Supplement_2) ◽  
pp. A18-A19
Author(s):  
Molly Zimmerman ◽  
Christiane Hale ◽  
Adam Brickman ◽  
Lok-Kin Yeung ◽  
Justin Cochran ◽  
...  

Abstract Introduction Sleep loss has a range of detrimental effects on cognitive ability. However, few studies have examined the impact of sleep restriction on neuropsychological function using an experimental design. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which maintained insufficient sleep affects cognition in healthy adults compared to habitual adequate sleep. Methods This study used a randomized, crossover, outpatient sleep restriction design. Adults who regularly slept at least 7 h/night, verified by 2 weeks of screening with actigraphy, completed 2 phases of 6 weeks each: habitual sleep (>7 h of sleep/night) or sleep restriction (habitual sleep minus 1.5 h) separated by a 6-week washout period. During the sleep restriction phase, participants were asked to delay their bedtime by 1.5 hours/night while maintaining their habitual wake time. Neuropsychological function was evaluated with the NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery at baseline (week 0) and endpoint (week 6) of each intervention phase. The NIH Toolbox evaluates a range of cognitive abilities, including attention, executive functioning, and working memory. General linear models with post hoc paired t-tests were used to assess demographically-adjusted test scores prior to and following each sleep condition. Results At the time of analyses, 16 participants were enrolled (age 34.5□14.5 years, 9 women), 10 of whom had completed study procedures. An interaction between sleep condition and testing session revealed that individuals performed worse on List Sorting, a working memory test, after sleep restriction but improved slightly after habitual sleep (p<0.001). While not statistically reliable, the pattern of test results was similar on the other tests of processing speed, executive function, and attention. Conclusion In these preliminary results from this randomized experimental study, we demonstrated that sleep restriction has a negative impact while stable habitual adequate sleep has a positive impact on working memory, or the ability to temporarily hold information in mind while executing task demands. This finding contributes to our understanding of the complex interplay between different aspects of sleep quality (i.e., both sleep restriction as well as the maintenance of stable sleep patterns) on cognition and underscores the importance of routine sleep screening as part of medical evaluations. Support (if any):


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4513
Author(s):  
Summaira Malik ◽  
Muhammad Taqi ◽  
José Moleiro Martins ◽  
Mário Nuno Mata ◽  
João Manuel Pereira ◽  
...  

The success of a construction project is a widely discussed topic, even today, and there exists a difference of opinion. The impact of communication and conflict on project success is an important, but least addressed, issue in literature, especially in the case of underdeveloped countries. Miscommunication and conflict not only hinder the success of a project but also may lead to conflicts. The focus of this paper was to examine the impact of communication on project success with the mediating role of conflict. By using SPSS, demographics, descriptive statistics and correlation were determined. Smart PLS version 3.0 was used for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), internal accuracy and validity estimates, hypothesis checking and mediation testing. The results showed that formal communication has a negative impact on the success of a construction project, resulting in conflicts among project team members, whereas informal communication and communication willingness have a positive impact on project success because people tend to know each other, and trust is developed. Task, process and relationship conflicts were used as mediating variables. It was found that task conflict effects the relations positively because project team members suggest different ways to do a certain task, and, hence, project success is achieved. On the contrary, process conflict and relationship conflict have a negative impact on communication and project success. Both of these conflicts lead to miscommunication, and project success is compromised. Hence, it is the responsibility of the project manager to enhance communication among project team members and to reduce the detrimental effects of process and relationship conflict on project success.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6749
Author(s):  
Shuyang Chen

In the literature, very few studies have focused on how urbanisation will influence the policy effects of a climate policy even though urbanisation does have profound socioeconomic impacts. This paper has explored the interrelations among the urbanisation, carbon emissions, GDP, and energy consumption in China using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. Then, the unit urbanisation impacts are inputted into the policy evaluation framework of the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model in 2015–2030. The results show that the urbanisation had a positive impact on the GDP but a negative impact on the carbon emissions in 1980–2014. These impacts were statistically significant, but its impact on the energy consumption was not statistically significant. In 2015–2030, the urbanisation will have negative impacts on the carbon emissions and intensity. It will decrease the GDP and the household welfare under the carbon tax. The urbanisation will increase the average social cost of carbon (ASCC). Hence, the urbanisation will reinforce the policy effects of the carbon tax on the emissions and welfare.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Kraetzer ◽  
Andrey Makrushin ◽  
Jana Dittmann ◽  
Mario Hildebrandt

AbstractInformation fusion, i.e., the combination of expert systems, has a huge potential to improve the accuracy of pattern recognition systems. During the last decades, various application fields started to use different fusion concepts extensively. The forensic sciences are still hesitant if it comes to blindly applying information fusion. Here, a potentially negative impact on the classification accuracy, if wrongly used or parameterized, as well as the increased complexity (and the inherently higher costs for plausibility validation) of fusion is in conflict with the fundamental requirements for forensics.The goals of this paper are to explain the reasons for this reluctance to accept such a potentially very beneficial technique and to illustrate the practical issues arising when applying fusion. For those practical discussions the exemplary application scenario of morphing attack detection (MAD) is selected with the goal to facilitate the understanding between the media forensics community and forensic practitioners.As general contributions, it is illustrated why the naive assumption that fusion would make the detection more reliable can fail in practice, i.e., why fusion behaves in a field application sometimes differently than in the lab. As a result, the constraints and limitations of the application of fusion are discussed and its impact to (media) forensics is reflected upon.As technical contributions, the current state of the art of MAD is expanded by: The introduction of the likelihood-based fusion and an fusion ensemble composition experiment to extend the set of methods (majority voting, sum-rule, and Dempster-Shafer Theory of evidence) used previously The direct comparison of the two evaluation scenarios “MAD in document issuing” and “MAD in identity verification” using a realistic and some less restrictive evaluation setups A thorough analysis and discussion of the detection performance issues and the reasons why fusion in a majority of the test cases discussed here leads to worse classification accuracy than the best individual classifier


Biomolecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 832
Author(s):  
Monika Vidak ◽  
Boris Lazarević ◽  
Marko Petek ◽  
Jerko Gunjača ◽  
Zlatko Šatović ◽  
...  

Sweet pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) is one of the most important vegetable crops in the world because of the nutritional value of its fruits and its economic importance. Calcium (Ca) improves the quality of sweet pepper fruits, and the application of calcite nanoparticles in agricultural practice has a positive effect on the morphological, physiological, and physicochemical properties of the whole plant. The objectives of this study were to investigate the effect of commercial calcite nanoparticles on yield, chemical, physical, morphological, and multispectral properties of sweet pepper fruits using a combination of conventional and novel image-based nondestructive methods of fruit quality analysis. In the field trial, two sweet pepper cultivars, i.e., Šorokšari and Kurtovska kapija, were treated with commercial calcite nanoparticles (at a concentration of 3% and 5%, calcite-based foliar fertilizer (positive control), and water (negative control) three times during vegetation). Sweet pepper fruits were harvested at the time of technological and physiological maturity. Significant differences were observed between pepper cultivars as well as between harvests times. In general, application of calcite nanoparticles reduced yield and increased fruit firmness. However, different effects of calcite nanoparticles were observed on almost all properties depending on the cultivar. In Šorokšari, calcite nanoparticles and calcite-based foliar fertilizers significantly increased N, P, K, Mg, Fe, Zn, Mn, and Cu at technological maturity, as well as P, Ca, Mg, Fe, Zn, Mn, Cu, and N at physiological maturity. However, in Kurtovska kapija, the treatments increased only Ca at technological maturity and only P at physiological maturity. The effect of treatments on fruit morphological properties was observed only at the second harvest. In Šorokšari, calcite nanoparticles (3% and 5%) increased the fruit length, minimal circle area, and minimal circle radius, and it decreased the fruit width and convex hull compared to the positive and negative controls, respectively. In Kurtovska kapija, calcite nanoparticles increased the fruit width and convex hull compared to the controls. At physiological maturity, lower anthocyanin and chlorophyll indices were found in Kurtovska kapija in both treatments with calcite nanoparticles, while in Šorokšari, the opposite effects were observed.


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