Concerns about animal enteropathogen contamination of fresh horticultural products have increased worldwide and are mainly due to the ability of bacteria to survive under stress conditions in the agricultural environment and during raw-vegetable processing. This review challenges the idea that the viable but nonculturable phenomenon that has been proven to occur in plant-associated environments contributes to human pathogen survival and might be

Escherichia coli O157:H7 continues to be an important human pathogen and has been increasingly linked to foodborne illness associated with fresh produce, particularly leafy greens. The aim of this work was to investigate the fate of E. coli O157:H7 on the phyllosphere of lettuce under low temperature and to evaluate the potential hazard of viable but non-culturable (VBNC) cells induced under such stressful conditions. First we studied the survival

There is great evidence regarding the beneficial influence of rose hips on human and animal health. In this respect, fruits of native populations of Rosa spp. collected from the northeastern part of Romania (400-1060 m altitude) were assayed for nutritional and some morphological properties, in order to select the best genotypes. The results show a great quantitative variability of analyzed genotypes, regarding dimensions and biochemical indicators

The somatic chromosomes and karyotype traits of three Romanian genotypes (coded as CB-1, S-16, L-4) of Hippophae rhamnoides L. have been studied. Diploid chromosome number is 2n=24. The karyomorphological data show that the complements have small chromosomes (1.33 ± 0.014 – 2.80±0.01 μm, for CB-1 genotype; 1.13 ± 0.029 – 2.90 ± 0.029 μm, for S-16; 1.15 ± 0.099 – 2.88 ± 0.024 μm, for L-4 genotype) and the length of haploid complements

Principal limitation of cell therapy is cell loss after transplantation because of the interplay between ischemia, inflammation, and apoptosis. We investigated the mechanism of preconditioning of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) with oxytocin (OT), which has been proposed as a novel strategy for enhancing therapeutic potential of these cells in ischemic heart. In this study, we demonstrate that rat MSCs express binding sites for OT receptor and OT receptor