News about Melissa Venturi

Nothing is wasted from sweet cherry: bioactive compounds are extracted from the stones

Processed

25 Jan 2024

A common alternative to fresh consumption is its employment in the production of a wide range of food items. Combining bioactive components and essential acids contained in cherry seeds, a positive repercussion in both economic and environmental terms is desirable.

Reducing pollution thanks to sour cherry leaves

Health

19 Jan 2024

Adsorption capacities of 524.1 (mg g-1) were obtained for crystal violet and 168.6 (mg g-1) for methylene blue. These capacities significantly exceed those of other comparable adsorbents. The only disadvantage? The inability to regenerate the adsorbent.

Putrescine makes trees more resistant to late frosts, while reducing the risk of cracking

Tech management

17 Jan 2024

The results showed that putrescine-treated buds decreased the overall malondialdehyde content (and thus the level of oxidative stress), while the rate of fruit set increased during most of the growing seasons evaluated.

From waste to resource: sour cherry pits as a cosmetic ingredient

Health

08 Jan 2024

The re-use of these by-products thus seems a better alternative to the disposal or annual incineration of millions of tonnes of cherry pits, which not only mitigates environmental pollution, but also adheres to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations.

Physiological models help predict the blooming date

Breeding

05 Jan 2024

The study covers the growing seasons from 2011/12 until 2019/20 for the development of the model and 2020/21-2022/23 for its validation. The M1 model is based on an inverse modelling methodology, M2 and M3, on the other hand, are more physiologically grounded.

Blooming date is decided (at genetic level) before winter dormancy

Breeding

02 Jan 2024

Researchers at Michigan State University (USA) provide a comprehensive analysis of the flower development of sour cherries. Numerous transcriptional studies have shown that the regulation of flower initiation in rosaceous species is significantly influenced by hormonal balance.

Advancements in cherry winter grafting with cold atmospheric plasma treatments

Nurseries

18 Dec 2023

The innovation of this method is the use of a portable device designed to produce cold plasma and a plasma-treated solution. 15-45 seconds of cold plasma exposure prior to grafting on fresh sections of scions and rootstocks increases root collar diameter and growth length.

Towards a more sustainable sweet cherry production: the use of mycorrhizae to increase drought resistance

Tech management

12 Dec 2023

Field, laboratory, biochemical, physiological and statistical methods were used for this research. Root inoculation with MycoApply Micronised Endo/Ecto resulted in a 1.3-11.8% increase in the water-holding capacity of the leaves compared to the control group.

A new (non-destructive) method to identify decay and ripening stage of cherries

Post-harvest​

07 Dec 2023

The approach shows excellent performance in cherry recognition. It is remarkable that the training time of Swin Transformer and MLP was only 78.43 seconds (when in the absence of MLP the training time was 551.24 seconds) and that their recognition accuracy peaked at 98.5%.

Amino acids can be used to make plants more resistant to waterlogging

Tech management

23 Nov 2023

Rootstock tolerance to conditions of soil saturation can be improved through the activation of enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant defence mechanisms by the application of amino acids that can improve the plants' response to unfavourable conditions caused by water logging.