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Powdery mildew, caused by Golovinomyces orontii and Podosphaera xanthii, is a widespread disease that causes important losses in cucurbit production. To determine the aetiology and the epidemiology of cucurbit powdery mildew disease in the North of Italy, observations on the occurrence of the main disease-causing fungal species were conducted during the 2010, 2011 and 2012 growing seasons. Samples of infected leaves of zucchini, melon and pumpkin plants, either from field or greenhouse crops, were collected every 15–18 days from May to September/October. To identify the fungal species, both morphological observations based on the asexual stage and molecular identifications by a Multiplex-PCR reaction with species-specific primers were performed. Climatic parameters of temperature and relative humidity were also monitored. Pearson's correlation coefficient and Principal Component Analysis showed a negative significant correlation between the two species, and a peculiar epidemiological behaviour was also observed: the earlier infections were caused by G. orontii, which was the predominant species till the end of June–middle of July. At this time, this species progressively decreased in frequency and was replaced by P. xanthii that became the main species infecting cucurbits till the end of the growing season. As the two species have different ecological requirements, these seasonal variations in the cucurbit powdery mildew species composition could possibly be explained by the influence of temperature and relative humidity on the pathogen epidemiology during the growing season but also by the different overwintering strategies adopted by the two species. more...

Charcot neuroarthropathy is defined by painful or relatively painless bone and joint deformity in limbs that have lost sensory innervation (1). The incidence is ∼0.1–5% in diabetic patients with peripheral neuropathy (2,3). The pathogenesis of Charcot neuroarthropathy is unknown (1,4). In acute Charcot neuroarthropathy, osteoclast activity increases (5). Alendronate is a bisphosphonate that induces the apoptosis of the osteoclasts (6). The utilization of the alendronate could improve the clinical signs of acute Charcot neuroarthropathy and stop bone reabsorption. A total of 20 consecutive patients with a new diagnosis of acute painful Charcot neuroarthropathy were enrolled after the approval of the ethics committee. The patients gave informed consent. Acute Charcot neuroarthropathy was defined on the basis of at least three of the following clinical signs: edema, erythema, and skin temperature increase of 2°C compared with contralateral foot (temperature was measured using an infrared thermometer [Riester] at the site of the maximum deformity of the affected foot and on a similar site on the contralateral foot), deformity, tenderness, abnormal motility, and palpatory crunches. According to a blinded randomization, 11 patients, who were treated with 70 mg alendronate by mouth once a week (test group), and 9 control subjects were followed for 6 months. All patients received a total contact cast boot for the first 2 months and pneumatic walker for … more...

Up to 2005 the sensitivity of Stemphylium vesicarium (Wallr.) Simm., the causal agent of pear brown spot, to the strobilurin fungicides kresoximmethyl, trifloxystrobin and pyraclostrobin was still comparable with baseline values associated with good efficacy in the field. During 2006, the first resistant isolates were detected in two commercial pear orchards in the Emilia-Romagna region (Italy), one of which was affected by considerable control failure linked to strobilurin treatments as demonstrated in a field trial. In vitro sensitivity tests with 0.5 mg l−1 of kresoxim-methyl, trifloxystrobin and pyraclostrobin showed that in the population collected in the orchard with control failure the conidial germination was greater than 90% compared to an untreated control both in 2006 and in 2007, i.e. 1 year after the suspension of strobilurin applications. In the other orchard, where only a few symptomatic fruits were found and the strobilurins were still in use, the conidial germination was lower, about 50% in 2006 and 25% in 2007. The molecular analysis of mitochondrial cytochrome b gene of some monospore isolates with different levels of sensitivity confirmed the presence of the mutation causing G143A substitution in all the resistant isolates. In conclusion, both in vitro tests and molecular analysis confirmed the first occurrence of Stemphylium vesicarium resistance to all strobilurin fungicides tested. more...

Existing approaches for fine-grained access control for RDF data suffer from high overhead, making them ill-suited for mobile devices. This makes it difficult to develop mobile applications that manage personal RDF data in a privacy preserving manner. In this paper we propose a new approach to realise fine-grained access control for mobile devices. We show how fine-grained privacy settings for personal information stored in mobile devices can be described using the Privacy Preference Ontology (PPO) - a light-weight vocabulary for defining fine-grained privacy preferences. Moreover, we introduce a two stage privacy preservation approach for efficient filtering of personal information on mobile devices. Our approach combines (1) an efficient query-based analysis stage with (2) a result filtering stage based on the privacy preferences described using PPO. © 2013 Springer-Verlag. more...

INTRODUCTION The control of Stemphylium vesicarium (Wallr.) Simm., the causal agent of pear brown spot, is a true concern for pear growers in Italy because many fungicide treatments are required from petal fall to fruit ripening (Ponti et al.,1996; Brunelli et al., 2004). The occurrence of resistance to dicarboximides in the early 1990’s (Brunelli et al., 1997) and to strobilurins in 2006 (Collina et al., 2007) complicated the control of this pathogen even more. The introduction in the field of new fungi-cides with different mechanisms of action is thus fundamental in order to enlarge the range of effective fungicides against pear brown spot and to reduce the risk of further resistances. At the end of the 2006 season boscalid was registered in Italy for pear. It belongs to the carboxamide-fungicide group and inhibits the respiratory chain acting on the enzyme succinate dehydrogenase in complex II (Stammler et al., 2007). This mode of action is different from that of both dicarboximide and strobilurin fungicides and it could be used in cases of field resistance to these compounds. Nevertheless, boscalid is considered by the FRAC to have a medium risk of resistance for its spe-cific target (www.frac.info). In order to evaluate the sensitivity of S. vesicarium to this fungicide, an in vitro assay was developed comparing different methods (on mycelial growth with differ-ent media and on conidial germination). Baseline sensitivity was then determined for isolates which have never been exposed to boscalid. more...