Review: the interaction between rootstocks and cultivars (Vitis vinifera L.) to enhance drought tolerance in grapevine

Water scarcity is a key limiting factor in agriculture. Grapevines react at the physiological, biochemical and genetic level to tolerate water constraints. Even though grapevines are considered relatively tolerant to water deficits, grapevine growth and yield can be seriously reduced under water deficit. Drought‐tolerant rootstocks are expected to enable the scion to grow and yield when water supply is limited. Genetic machinery allows rootstocks to control water extraction capacity and scion transpiration. Numerous works have demonstrated the positive role of drought‐tolerant rootstocks on the control of cultivar's leaf stomatal conductance and therefore on canopy transpiration. The mechanisms, in terms of signalisation and gene functioning, need further study. Furthermore, there is no standardised methodology to rank rootstocks in terms of their tolerance to drought. A potential effect of rootstocks on stomatal development is also discussed. This review will critically discuss the current knowledge of the mechanisms of drought tolerance afforded by rootstocks, taking into account the scion/rootstock interaction, and will present some of the challenges for future investigations.     

Softness in dry-cured porcine biceps femoris muscles in relation to meat quality characteristics and processing conditions

The aim of the study was to quantify the effect of meat quality characteristics and some processing conditions on the softness of dry-cured biceps femoris (BF) muscles. The BF muscles were dissected from forty hams and classified according to their pH_BF into three groups: LpH (pH < 5.66), MpH (5.66  pH  6.00) and HpH (pH > 6.00). BF muscles within each pH_BF group were distributed into three different Salting levels (1%, 2% or 4% of added NaCl). Muscles were salted, vacuum-packed and stored at 3 °C for 30 days. The post-salting BF muscles were classified into two intramuscular fat (IMF) levels: Low (IMF < 4%) and High (IMF  4%). Thereafter, the muscles were divided into two pieces and dried at two of the three different Drying levels (1.5, 2 and 2.5 g H₂O/g desalted dry matter). Then, each piece was divided into two samples that were packed in N₂ and stored at 5 °C or 30 °C for 1 month. Stress Relaxation was used to evaluate texture. Dry-cured BF muscles with initial pH > 6.0, with IMF > 4% or with added NaCl levels less than 2% were more prone to show soft texture. Softness in dry-cured muscles can be reduced by applying an ageing temperature of 30 °C for 30 days, despite increasing proteolysis. The softness reduction by ageing at 30 °C compared with 5 °C is expected to be higher when applied to drier samples, which show a smaller increase in proteolysis.     

Systemic reliability of bridge networks with mobile sensing-based model updating for postevent transportation decisions

This paper proposes the upscaling of conventional individual bridge health monitoring problems into urban regions and transportation networks via mobile and smart sensing techniques together with an innovative reconnaissance procedure. The paper associates structural failure probabilities with systemic features and proposes decision criteria to optimize postdisaster actions. Twenty bridges constituting transportation network infrastructure compose the testbed region and utilize smartphone accelerometers for dynamics characterization in a vibration-based framework. In this framework, reconnaissance output serves for model development, and mobile sensor data enable finite element model updating. Structural reliability analyses merged in a chain setting generate the systemic behavior of cascaded bridge performance. Combining systemic reliability with transportation and health services demand, one can optimize the response strategies of the bridge population and strategize disaster-related decisions in a postevent assessment setting. Based on a testbed region with remote access to nearby vicinities, 18 earthquake scenarios are conducted to visualize the optimal evacuation strategies on the network, taking systemic bridge performance into consideration. Cost-free mobile sensing support adds one more fundamental information source for reducing the uncertainty of the models and, therefore, improves associated mitigation actions.     

Wear resistance by copolymers with controlled structure under boundary lubrication conditions

Lubricants are of paramount importance in protecting metallic contact surfaces and reducing friction. The viscosity of lubricating oil can be engineered by introducing long linear polymers, such as poly(lauryl methacrylate) (PLMA). In particular, the formation of adsorption films by using polymers with hydroxy or amino side groups has attracted much attention in recent years. In this study, copolymers with controlled structure were synthesised by SARA ATRP, which can be used in large scale production. A comparison of friction and wear under boundary lubrication was conducted using both statistical and block copolymers with low Ð. Friction test results using a reciprocating sliding machine (SRV) showed that the block copolymers were less likely to desorb from the metal surface than the statistical copolymers. In addition, the wear evaluation after the SRV test showed that the block copolymer had less wear and less wear debris.     

Nanographene-Based Decoration as a Panchromatic Antenna for Metalloporphyrin Conjugates

Porphyrins, a type of heterocyclic aromatic compounds consisting of tetrapyrroles connected by four substituted methine groups, are appealing building blocks for solar energy applications. However, their photosensitization capability is limited by their large optical energy gap, which results in a mismatch in absorption toward efficient harvesting of the solar spectrum. Porphyrin π-extension by edge-fusing with nanographenes can be employed for narrowing their optical energy gap from 2.35 to 1.08 eV, enabling the development of porphyrin-based panchromatic dyes with an optimized energy onset for solar energy conversion in dye-sensitized solar fuel and solar cell configurations. By combining time-dependent density functional theory with fs transient absorption spectroscopy, it is found that the primary singlets, which are delocalized across the entire aromatic part, are transferred into metal centred triplets in only 1.2 ps; and subsequently, relax toward ligand-delocalized triplets. This observation implies that the decoration of the porphyrin moiety with nanographenes, while having a large impact on the absorption onset of the novel dye, promotes the formation of a ligand-centred lowest triplet state of large spatial extension, potentially interesting for boosting interactions with electron scavengers. These results reveal a design strategy for broadening the applicability of porphyrin-based dyes in optoelectronics.     

Monitoring structural scale composite specimens in a post-buckling regime: The integrated finite element stereo digital image correlation approach with geometrically non-linear regularization

Even though the simulations used to describe the failure of laminates are becoming more and more predictive, complex testing under multiaxial loadings is still required to validate the design of structural parts in a wide range of industrial domains. It is thus essential to assess the actual boundary conditions to allow for an objective comparison between testing and calculations, in particular since the structural tests are complex and often leads to buckling. Therefore, accurate estimation of force and moment fluxes applied to the specimen is critical. In this context, stereo digital image correlation (SDIC) has proven to be an important measurement tool and provides very well-resolved surface displacement fields, but the exploitation of such measurements to calculate fluxes remains problematic when testing composites. The first objective of this study is both to reduce the uncertainty associated with fluxes determination on a complex test and to simplify the extraction process with respect to existing procedures. The second objective is to make this methodology robust to geometrically non-linear deformations. In this paper, we propose a new methodology that extracts minimal boundary conditions in the form of 3D mechanically admissible displacements fields. The approach developed uses a finite element SDIC (FE-SDIC) method regularized by means of mechanical behaviour admissibility equations. Results show that the new methodology outputs much more accurate fluxes than classical data generated from multiple differentiations of the displacement fields. Excellent noise robustness is obtained and quantified. Numerical predictions have been satisfactorily compared with experimental data from one structural-scale composite specimen under complex testing.