Investigation into the Presence of Fungi Associated with Esca of Young Vines

Thirty one 5 to 6-year-old grapevines with esca foliar symptoms, aspecific foliar symptoms, apoplexy and no symptoms at all were uprooted and examined in the laboratory for type of wood deterioration and presence of fungi. Various types of deterioration were recorded in the wood, three of which were found in all vines: necrosis originating in the cane stumps, sparse blackish streaks or blackish halos around the rootstock pith. Spongy decay was observed on six of the eight grapevines with the foliar symptoms of esca. Blackening of some roots was found on apoplectic vines. Among the fungi involved in esca, Phaeoacremonium chlamydosporum was isolated especially from the blackish halos around the rootstock pith, while Eutypa lata only from cane stump necrosis; but both were present on grapevines with and without foliar symptoms. Fomitiporia sp. was present only in spongy decay on vines with foliar esca symptoms. This fungus seems able to produce spongy decay only in necrotic tissues, but the necrosis itself could also be caused by non-parasitic factors. It was difficult to relate foliar symptoms to pathogen presence; it is necessary to examine a far larger number of samples to gather more accurate information

Investigation into the Occurrence of Esca-Associated Fungi in Cuttings and Bench-Grafted Vines

Rootstocks, scions, certified virus-free grafted plants and 1-year old plants were studied to determine the incidence of wood discoloration and the occurrence of fungi associated with esca. On cuttings very little discoloration was observed and fungal infection was negligible. The majority of grafts and vines showed blackening and harboured a variety of fungi, mainly Phaeoacremonium spp., with Phaeomoniella chlamydospora in second place. The presence of these fungi as endophytes requires further investigation to determine the conditions under which they become pathogenic and to determine when contamination of vine material occurs during nursery operations

Senso Comune as a Knowledge Base of Italian language: The Resource and its Development

International audienceSenso Comune is a linguistic knowledge base for the Italian Language, which accommodates the content of a legacy dictionary in a rich formal model. The model is implemented in a platform which allows a community of contributors to enrich the resource. We provide here an overview of the main project features, including the lexical-ontology model, the process of sense classification, and the annotation of meaning definitions (glosses) and lexicographic examples. Also, we will illustrate the latest work of alignment with MultiWordNet, to illustrate the methodologies that have been experimented with, to share some preliminary result, and to highlight some remarkable findings about the semantic coverage of the two resources

Fast and Effective Kernels for Relational Learning from Texts

In this paper, we define a family of syntactic kernels for automatic relational learning from pairs of natural language sentences. We provide an efficient computation of such models by optimizing the dynamic programming algorithm of the kernel evaluation. Experiments with Support Vector Machines and the above kernels show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on two very important natural language tasks, Textual Entailment Recognition and Question Answering. 1

Investigation into the presence of <i>Fungi</i> associated with esca of young vines

Thirty one 5 to 6-year-old grapevines with esca foliar symptoms, aspecific foliar symptoms, apoplexy and no symptomps at all were uprooted and examined in the laboratory for type of wood deterioration and presence of fungi. Various types of deterioration were recorded in the wood, three of which were found in all vines: necrosis originating in the cane stumps, sparse blackish streaks or blackish halos around the rootstock pith. Spongy decay was observed on six of the eight grapevines with the foliar symptoms of esca. Blackening of some roots was found on apoplectic vines. Among the fungi involved in esca, Phaeoacremonium chlamydosporum was isolated especially from the blackish halos around the rootstock pith, while Eutypa lata only from cane stump necrosis; but both were present on grapevines eith and without foliar symptoms. Fomitiporia sp. was present only in spongy decay on vines with foliar esca symptoms. This fungus seems able to produce spongy decay only in necrotic tissues, but the necrosis itself could also be caused by non-parasitic factors. It was difficult to relate foliar sumptoms to pathogen presence; it is necessary to examine a far larger number of samples to gather more accurate information