Publications by authors named "Benoit Bizimungu"

Drought poses a major challenge to the production of potatoes worldwide. Climate change is predicted to further aggravate this challenge by intensifying potato crop exposure to increased drought severity and frequency. There is an ongoing effort to adapt our production systems of potatoes through the development of drought-tolerant cultivars that are appropriately engineered for the changing environment.

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Competition for scarce water resources and the continued effects of global warming exacerbate current constraints on potato crop production. While plants' response to drought in above-ground tissues has been well documented, the regulatory cascades and subsequent nutritive changes in developing tubers have been largely unexplored. Using the commercial Canadian cultivar "Vigor", plants were subjected to a gradual drought treatment under high tunnels causing a 4 °C increase in the canopy temperature.

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Tubers are vegetative reproduction organs formed from underground extensions of the plant stem. Potato tubers are harvested and stored for months. Storage under cold temperatures of 2-4 °C is advantageous for supressing sprouting and diseases.

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Global climate change in the form of extreme heat and drought poses a major challenge to sustainable crop production by negatively affecting plant performance and crop yield. Such negative impact on crop yield is likely to be aggravated in future because continued greenhouse gas emissions will cause further rise in temperature leading to increased evapo-transpiration and drought severity, soil salinity as well as insect and disease threats. This has raised a major challenge for plant scientists on securing global food demand, which urges an immediate need to enhance the current yield of major food crops by two-fold to feed the increasing population.

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This study aimed to determine the effect of combinations of blanching parameters, including blanching temperatures ranging from 65 to 85 °C and duration times ranging from 2 to 10 min, on reducing sugars, asparagine, acrylamide, and color levels of fried potato chips. Response surface methodology was used to develop response surface equations to estimate these effects. These latter were evaluated before and after a 3-month storage period of potato tubers at 10 °C.

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To identify healthier potatoes with respect to starch profiles, fourteen early varieties were evaluated for their dietary fiber, total starch, rapidly digestible (RDS), slowly digestible (SDS), and resistant (RS) starch for nutrition and with regard to estimated glycemic index (eGI) and glycemic load (eGL). While all these profiles were highly dependent on the potato variety, eleven out of fourteen varieties were classified as low GL foods (p<0.05).

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Potatoes usually have the tuber bud end dominance in growth during tuber bulking and in tuber sprouting, likely using carbohydrates from the tuber stem end. We hypothesized that the tuber bud end and tuber stem end coordination in carbohydrate metabolism gene expression is different between the bulking dominance and sprouting dominance of the tuber bud end. After comparing the growing tubers at harvest from a green vine and the stage that sprouts just started to emerge after storage of tubers at room temperature, we found the following: (1) Dry matter content was higher in the tuber stem end than the tuber bud end at both stages.

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Biochemically, starch is composed of amylose and amylopectin but can also be defined by its digestibility rates within the human intestinal tract, i.e., rapidly digested (RDS), slowly digested (SDS), or resistant (RS).

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The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the effects of cooling and reheating on the glycaemic index (GI) of novel potato clones (selections) differed depending on selection and whether cooling altered starch absorption in vivo. We conducted 3 experiments using 4 novel potato clones in healthy subjects. Experiment 1: the GI of 4 selections each prepared in 3 ways (freshly boiled, cooled, or cooled and reheated) was measured in 2 groups of 10 subjects (each group tested 2 selections).

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