Papers by Marina Bufacchi
Canopy Architectural Characteristics of Ten New Olive (Olea europaea L.) Genotypes and Their Potential for Cultivation in Super-High-Density Orchards
Plants, May 17, 2024
Scientific Reports, 2019
Olive is a long-living perennial species with a wide geographical distribution, showing a large g... more Olive is a long-living perennial species with a wide geographical distribution, showing a large genetic and phenotypic variation in its growing area. There is an urgent need to uncover how olive phenotypic traits and plasticity can change regardless of the genetic background. A two-year study was conducted, based on the analysis of fruit and oil traits of 113 cultivars from five germplasm collections established in Mediterranean Basin countries and Argentina. Fruit and oil traits plasticity, broad‐sense heritability and genotype by environment interaction were estimated. From variance and heritability analyses, it was shown that fruit fresh weight was mainly under genetic control, whereas oleic/(palmitic + linoleic) acids ratio was regulated by the environment and genotype by environment interaction had the major effect on oil content. Among the studied cultivars, different level of stability was observed, which allowed ranking the cultivars based on their plasticity for oil traits....
Sustainability
A comprehensive effort was devoted to exploring, collecting and characterizing the local Maltese ... more A comprehensive effort was devoted to exploring, collecting and characterizing the local Maltese olive germplasm, often represented by ancient, monumental trees and by plants of uncertain origin. SSR and cp-SSR analysis of all samples enabled the identification of 46 genotypes and establishment of the correspondence between ancient trees, main local varieties and other Mediterranean cultivars. The application of plastid markers enabled identification of two lineages among Maltese genotypes, with more than 50% represented by lineage E2. Twenty-nine cases of grafting were identified among the various genotypes and lineages. In most cases, E1 canopies were grafted on E2 rootstocks, but reverse cases were also observed. The phylogenetic study of Maltese genotypes, together with hundreds of cultivars from the Mediterranean Basin and beyond, highlights the richness of Maltese olive diversity and drawing attention to the genetic similarity of some Maltese olive genotypes with neighboring I...
Antioxidants
The health, therapeutic, and organoleptic characteristics of olive oil depend on functional bioac... more The health, therapeutic, and organoleptic characteristics of olive oil depend on functional bioactive compounds, such as phenols, tocopherols, squalene, and sterols. Genotype plays a key role in the diversity and concentration of secondary compounds peculiar to olive. In this study, the most important bioactive compounds of olive fruit were studied in numerous international olive cultivars during two consecutive seasons. A large variability was measured for each studied metabolite in all 61 olive cultivars. Total phenol content varied on a scale of 1–10 (3831–39,252 mg kg−1) in the studied cultivars. Squalene values fluctuated over an even wider range (1–15), with values of 274 to 4351 mg kg−1. Total sterols ranged from 119 to 969 mg kg−1, and total tocopherols varied from 135 to 579 mg kg−1 in fruit pulp. In the present study, the linkage among the most important quality traits highlighted the scarcity of cultivars with high content of at least three traits together. This work prov...
Thermal regime and cultivar effects on squalene and sterol contents in olive fruits: Results from a field network in different Argentinian environments
Scientia Horticulturae
Additional file 1. Morphological parameters extracted from the proposed methodology.
Renewable Energy, 2020
This study regards the estimate of olive oil pruning biomass. The objective is to increase the kn... more This study regards the estimate of olive oil pruning biomass. The objective is to increase the knowledge of pruning biomass availability to business purposes. Having recognized the importance of both uncertainty and dynamics, we first estimate the probability distribution of the yields in a small farms sample and then determine the related expected value of pruning olive oil yield. We use these estimates to draw microscenarios illustrating the dynamics of the pruning biomass yields based on the enlargement of the number of trees per hectare (intensification) and of the olive oil crop area (specialization). The results show how intensification and specialization determine a mosaic pattern of changes in the pruning yields probabilities. The resulting estimate of the pruning biomass availability is similar to those provided in literature for the Italian case. Across the Italian regions, the difference between the expected pruning yield and a theoretical yield index decreases as the specialization increases. Two validity boundaries of the model are presented. The study concludes noting that, unless they are associated, intensification and specification not systematically augment the average olive oil pruning biomass yield in a territory and that the yields increase appears to be more probable beyond intensification large values.
Scientific Reports, 2020
Olive tree is a vector of cultural heritage in Mediterranean. This study explored the biocultural... more Olive tree is a vector of cultural heritage in Mediterranean. This study explored the biocultural geography of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) from the cultivar Ogliarola campana in Campania region, Italy. Here, the rich cultural elements related to olive tree and oil represent a suitable case study for a biocultural analysis. We joined analytical techniques, based on stable isotopes and trace elements of EVOOs, with humanistic analyses, based on toponymy and historical data. In order to provide a science-based assessment of the terroir concept, we set up a new method of data analysis that inputs heterogeneous data from analytical and anthropic variables and outputs an original global evaluation score, named terroir score, as a measure of biocultural distinctiveness of the production areas. The analysis highlighted two distinct cultural sub-regions in the production area of Ogliarola campana: a continental cluster in the inner area of Irpinia and a coastal one around Salerno province....
Acta Horticulturae, 2018
Olive cultivation is increasing around the world, expanding from its native area of cultivation. ... more Olive cultivation is increasing around the world, expanding from its native area of cultivation. To meet this new demand, breeding is playing an important role to introduce into cultivation new cultivars with desirable attributes of olive oil quality. Eighteen seedlings, derived from 'Leccino' × 'Ascolana Tenera', 'Leccino' × 'Dolce Agogia' and 'Leccino' × 'Kalamata', together with parental cultivars, were selected based on their productivity. Fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) and phenolic compositions were evaluated. Characterization of the phenolic profiles was performed by liquid-liquid extraction with 80:20 (v/v) methanol/water and subsequent chromatographic analysis with UV-liquid chromatography and spectrophotometer absorption. To determine the FAME composition, samples were analyzed by gas chromatography-flame ionization detection (GC-FID). High variability was detected within and between the different cross progenies, with considerable deviation from their parents. In general, the highest values of total phenols (700 mg kg-1 oil) were measured in 'Leccino' × 'Ascolana Tenera' seedlings, with large amounts of individual phenols, such as forms of oleuropein and vanillic, p-coumaric, ferulic and cinnamic acids. Furthermore, a seedling from 'Leccino' × 'Ascolana Tenera' revealed interesting percentage of FAMEs, especially for oleic (85.42%) and linoleic (5.38%) acids. The study established the possibility of improving the quality of olive oil by cross-breeding of known cultivars. The best seedlings will be propagated for further evaluations such as agronomical, physiological and biochemical aspects.
Plant Methods, 2017
Background: The morphological analysis of olive leaves, fruits and endocarps may represent an eff... more Background: The morphological analysis of olive leaves, fruits and endocarps may represent an efficient tool for the characterization and discrimination of cultivars and the establishment of relationships among them. In recent years, much attention has been focused on the application of molecular markers, due to their high diagnostic efficiency and independence from environmental and phenological variables. Results: In this study, we present a semi-automatic methodology of detecting various morphological parameters. With the aid of computing and image analysis tools, we created semi-automatic algorithms applying intuitive mathematical descriptors that quantify many fruit, leaf and endocarp morphological features. In particular, we examined quantitative and qualitative characters such as size, shape, symmetry, contour roughness and presence of additional structures such as nipple, petiole, endocarp surface roughness, etc.. Conclusion: We illustrate the performance and the applicability of our approach on Greek olive cultivars; on sets of images from fruits, leaves and endocarps. In addition, the proposed methodology was also applied for the description of other crop species morphologies such as tomato, grapevine and pear. This allows us to describe crop morphologies efficiently and robustly in a semi-automated way.
European Food Research and Technology, 2018
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer-Verlag Gmb... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Frontiers in plant science, 2017
Germplasm collections of tree crop species represent fundamental tools for conservation of divers... more Germplasm collections of tree crop species represent fundamental tools for conservation of diversity and key steps for its characterization and evaluation. For the olive tree, several collections were created all over the world, but only few of them have been fully characterized and molecularly identified. The olive collection of Perugia University (UNIPG), established in the years' 60, represents one of the first attempts to gather and safeguard olive diversity, keeping together cultivars from different countries. In the present study, a set of 370 olive trees previously uncharacterized was screened with 10 standard simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and nine new EST-SSR markers, to correctly and thoroughly identify all genotypes, verify their representativeness of the entire cultivated olive variation, and validate the effectiveness of new markers in comparison to standard genotyping tools. The SSR analysis revealed the presence of 59 genotypes, corresponding to 72 well known cult...
Bioresource Technology, 2016
Co-combustion behaviour of PR with 2PH and 3PH was studied. Effects of blending ratio and heating... more Co-combustion behaviour of PR with 2PH and 3PH was studied. Effects of blending ratio and heating rate on the combustion process were analysed. A synergistic effect was observed in PR-2PH and PR-3PH blends. Reactivity of the blends increase with increasing PR. The minimum apparent activation energy was obtained for 25PR752PH mixture.
Characterization of pellets from mixing olive pomace and olive tree pruning
Renewable Energy, 2016
Abstract Olive pomace is an interesting agro-industrial byproduct that can be a potential raw mat... more Abstract Olive pomace is an interesting agro-industrial byproduct that can be a potential raw material for densified biomass products. At first, 2-phase (2 PH) and 3-phase (3 PH) olive pomace pellets were analyzed in order to evaluate their quality in terms of the main parameters required by the European Standard EN 17225-6. The characterization of the pure pellets has shown important problems because of out of limits values of nitrogen, durability and copper in the two olive pomace. To improve the properties of olive pomace pellets, the possibility of manufacturing pellets by mixing olive pomace and olive tree pruning (PR) was investigated. Several blends at different weight ratios were analyzed in order to verify the effect of mixing on the pellet properties. It can be concluded that the physical properties of all mixtures are in compliance with the requirements of the standard. In particular, two best blends in terms of physical, chemical and mechanical characteristics were identified as becoming potential fuel for combustion and gasification applications: 75PR252 PH (75% pruning and 25% 2-phase pomace) and 50PR503 PH (50% pruning and 50% 3-phase pomace).
Plants
A prospecting campaign in the Maltese Islands has ensured the survival of several ancient olive t... more A prospecting campaign in the Maltese Islands has ensured the survival of several ancient olive trees (Olea europaea L.), genetically distant from known cultivars. Most of these plants were abandoned or partially cultivated. A two-year evaluation of fruit characteristics and compositions was performed on samples collected from the main representatives of these indigenous genotypes. Analyses were carried out using Gas Chromatography, High-Performance Liquid Chromatography and Near Infrared Spectrometry. Among the fruit samples, a wide range of variations was observed. Some of the genotypes showed fruit traits suitable for table olive production. This is the case of samples with a pulp/pit ratio higher than four, such as 1Wardija, 1Caritas, 1Plattini, 1Bingemma Malta and 3Loretu, whilst 1Bidni, 1Mellieha, 2Qnotta, 3Loretu, 1Bingemma Malta and 1Caritas were suitable for dual purpose. The total phenol content ranged from 6.3 (1Wardija) to 117.9 (2Mtarfa) g/kg of fresh pulp. The average ...
Additional file 2. Definitions of the morphological parameters.
Scientific Reports
Olive is a long-living perennial species with a wide geographical distribution, showing a large g... more Olive is a long-living perennial species with a wide geographical distribution, showing a large genetic and phenotypic variation in its growing area. There is an urgent need to uncover how olive phenotypic traits and plasticity can change regardless of the genetic background. A two-year study was conducted, based on the analysis of fruit and oil traits of 113 cultivars from five germplasm collections established in Mediterranean Basin countries and Argentina. Fruit and oil traits plasticity, broad‐sense heritability and genotype by environment interaction were estimated. From variance and heritability analyses, it was shown that fruit fresh weight was mainly under genetic control, whereas oleic/(palmitic + linoleic) acids ratio was regulated by the environment and genotype by environment interaction had the major effect on oil content. Among the studied cultivars, different level of stability was observed, which allowed ranking the cultivars based on their plasticity for oil traits....
Germplasm collections of tree crop species represent fundamental tools for conservation of divers... more Germplasm collections of tree crop species represent fundamental tools for conservation of diversity and key steps for its characterization and evaluation. For the olive tree, several collections were created all over the world, but only few of them have been fully characterized and molecularly identified. The olive collection of Perugia University (UNIPG), established in the years' 60, represents one of the first attempts to gather and safeguard olive diversity, keeping together cultivars from different countries. In the present study, a set of 370 olive trees previously uncharacterized was screened with 10 standard simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and nine new EST-SSR markers, to correctly and thoroughly identify all genotypes, verify their representativeness of the entire cultivated olive variation, and validate the effectiveness of new markers in comparison to standard genotyping tools. The SSR analysis revealed the presence of 59 genotypes, corresponding to 72 well known cultivars, 13 of them resulting exclusively present in this collection. The new EST-SSRs have shown values of diversity parameters quite similar to those of best standard SSRs. When compared to hundreds of Mediterranean cultivars, the UNIPG olive accessions were splitted into the three main populations (East, Center and West Mediterranean), confirming that the collection has a good representativeness of the entire olive variability. Furthermore, Bayesian analysis, performed on the 59 genotypes of the collection by the use of both sets of markers, have demonstrated their splitting into four clusters, with a well balanced membership obtained by EST respect to standard SSRs. The new OLEST (Olea expressed sequence tags) SSR markers resulted as effective as the best standard markers. The information obtained from this study represents a high valuable tool for ex situ conservation and management of olive genetic resources, useful to build a common database from worldwide olive cultivar collections, also based on recently developed markers.
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Papers by Marina Bufacchi