Metabolomic Profiling and Functional Characterization of Biochar from Vine Pruning Residues for Applications in Animal Feed.

Biochar has gained interest as a feed ingredient in livestock nutrition due to its functional properties, circularity, potential to reduce environmental impact, and alignment with sustainable agro-zootechnical practices. The in vivo effects of biochar are closely tied to its physical characteristics, which vary depending on the biomass used as feedstock and the production process. This variability can result in heterogeneity among biochar types used in animal nutrition, leading to inconsistent outcomes.

Genetic Improvement of (L.) Crantz: Opportunities and Challenges.

In recent years, a renewed interest in novel crops has been developing due to the environmental issues associated with the sustainability of agricultural practices. In particular, a cover crop, (L.) Crantz, belonging to the Brassicaceae family, is attracting the scientific community's interest for several desirable features.

Antifungal Activity and Biochemical Profiling of Exudates from Germinating Maize Nostrano di Storo Local Variety.

Plant pathogens are responsible for important damages to valuable crops causing important economic losses. Agrobiodiversity protection is crucial for the valorization of local varieties that could possess higher resistance to biotic and abiotic stress. At the beginning of germination, seeds are susceptible to pathogens attacks, thus they can release endogenous antimicrobial compounds of different natures in the spermosphere, to contrast proliferation of microorganisms.

Brachytic2 mutation is able to counteract the main pleiotropic effects of brown midrib3 mutant in maize.

Maize is the basis of nutrition of domesticated herbivores and one of the most promising energy crops. The presence of lignin in the cell wall, tightly associated to carbohydrates, prevents the physical access of enzymes such as cellulase, limiting the carbohydrate degradability and consequently the energy value. To increase the utilization of the biomass cellulose content, the challenge of breeding programs is to lower or modify the lignin components.

Bacterial Communities in the Embryo of Maize Landraces: Relation with Susceptibility to Fusarium Ear Rot.

Locally adapted maize accessions (landraces) represent an untapped resource of nutritional and resistance traits for breeding, including the shaping of distinct microbiota. Our study focused on five different maize landraces and a reference commercial hybrid, showing different susceptibility to fusarium ear rot, and whether this trait could be related to particular compositions of the bacterial microbiota in the embryo, using different approaches. Our cultivation-independent approach utilized the metabarcoding of a portion of the 16S rRNA gene to study bacterial populations in these samples.

Food Containing Bioactive Flavonoids and Other Phenolic or Sulfur Phytochemicals With Antiviral Effect: Can We Design a Promising Diet Against COVID-19?

Since in late 2019, when the coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pathogen of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started to spread all over the world, causing the awful global pandemic we are still experiencing, an impressive number of biologists, infectious disease scientists, virologists, pharmacologists, molecular biologists, immunologists, and other researchers working in laboratories of all the advanced countries focused their research on the setting up of biotechnological tools, namely vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, as well as of rational design of drugs for therapeutic approaches. While vaccines have been quickly obtained, no satisfactory anti-Covid-19 preventive, or therapeutic approach has so far been discovered and approved. However, among the possible ways to achieve the goal of COVID-19 prevention or mitigation, there is one route, i.