Bio-molecular
and metabolic descriptors in industrial crops from organic farming
- The remarkable economic
importance of the organic products urges the availability of analytical methods
able to discriminate and describe them in bio-molecular terms, with the aim
to evaluate as correctly as possible their nutritional, safety and traceability
characteristics.
- At ISCI currently comparative
analyses are carried out on potato tubers (cv. "Vivaldi") obtained
from plants grown under conventional or organic culture regime as the only
difference. Preliminary results indicated differences in SDS_PAGE electrophoretic
patterns for various tuber subcellular fractions; MALDI-TOF analysis allowed
to identify specific proteins with an altered expression level in the two product
types. The most marked differences seem to be related to the protein mechanisms
involved in starch anabolism/catabolism and in the source/sink mechanisms regulation.