Plant associate projects

α-Tomatine is an antifungal glycoalkaloid that provides basal defense to tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). However, tomato pathogens overcome this basal defense barrier by the secretion of tomatinases that degrade α-tomatine into the less fungitoxic compounds β-tomatine and tomatidine. Although pathogenic on tomato, it has been reported that the biotrophic fungus Cladosporium fulvum is unable to detoxify α-tomatine. · Here, we present a functional analysis of the glycosyl hydrolase (GH10), CfTom1, which is orthologous to fungal tomatinases. · We show that C.

Penicillium spp. are among the major postharvest pathogens of citrus fruit. Induction of natural resistance in fruits constitutes one of the alternatives to chemical fungicides. Here, we investigated the involvement of the phenylpropanoid pathway in the induction of resistance in Navelate oranges by examining changes in the metabolic profile of upon eliciting citrus fruits. By using both HPLC-PDA-FD and HPLC-PDA-QTOF-MS allowed the identification of several compounds that seem to be relevant for induced resistance.

The aim of this study was to investigate the growth-inhibiting efficacy of Drosera intermedia extracts (water, methanol and n-hexane) against four food spoilage yeasts and five filamentous fungi strains responsible for food deterioration and associated with mycotoxin production, in order to identify potential antimycotic agents.

Tanacetum parthenium produces biologically active sesquiterpene lactones (SL). Nuclear factor E2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) is a transcription factor known to activate a series of genes termed the antioxidant response element (ARE). Activation of Nrf2/ARE may be useful for the treatment of neurodegenerative disease. In this study we isolated 11 SL from T. parthenium with centrifugal partition chromatography and semipreparative HPLC. Compounds were screened in vitro for their ability to activate the ARE on primary mouse cortical cultures as well as for their toxicity towards the cultures.

Mass peak alignment (ion-wise alignment) has recently become a popular method for unsupervised data analysis in untargeted metabolic profiling. Here we present MSClust-a software tool for analysis GC-MS and LC-MS datasets derived from untargeted profiling. MSClust performs data reduction using unsupervised clustering and extraction of putative metabolite mass spectra from ion-wise chromatographic alignment data.