Eggplant is a widely consumed vegetable, with significant nutritional value and high antioxidant content, mainly due to its phenolic constituents. Our goal was to determine the levels of carbohydrates, proteins, total phenolics, anthocyanins, flavonoids, chlorogenic acid, and the antioxidant capacity in thirteen eggplant cultivars cultivated in Greece and to identify sequence polymorphisms in key regulating genes of the phenylpropanoid pathway (C4H, HCT, HQT, C3H, F3H, ANS, MYB1), which might relate to the phytochemical content of those cultivars. The carbohydrates’ content differs among and within cultivars, while the rest of the phytochemicals differ only among cultivars. The cultivars ‘EMI’ and ’Lagkada’ scored higher than the rest in phenolics, anthocyanins, ascorbic acid, caffeoylquinic acid, and antioxidant capacity. Moreover, significant correlations were observed between various ingredients and the antioxidant capacity (FRAP and DPPH). Sequence analysis revealed several SNPs in C4H, HQT, F3H, ANS, and MYB1 among the cultivars studied. According to chi-square and logistic regression analyses, the missense mutation C4H4-108 correlates significantly with flavonoids, anthocyanins, and proteins; the synonymous mutation HQT-105 correlates with anthocyanins and ascorbic acid; the missense mutation HQT-438 correlates with flavonoids and chlorogenic acid, while the missense mutation ANS1-65 correlates with anthocyanins and sugars. These polymorphisms can be potentially utilized as molecular markers in eggplant breeding, while our data also contribute to the study of eggplant’s secondary metabolism and antioxidant properties.

For an arbitrary strictly convex loss function, we study the problem of estimating a linear parametric function $\mu +k\sigma ,k$ is a known constant, when a doubly censored sample is available from a two-parameter exponential $E(\mu ,\sigma )$ population. We establish the inadmissibility of the best affine equivariant (BAE) estimator by deriving an improved estimator. We provide various implications for quadratic and linex loss functions in detail. Improvements are obtained for the absolute value loss function as well. Further a new class of estimators improving upon the BAE estimator is derived using the Kubokawa method. This class is shown to include some benchmark estimators from the literature.

Eggplant is a widely cultivated vegetable crop of great economic importance. Its long lasting history of domestication, selection and breeding has led to the development of numerous cultivars with variable traits. In the present study, we assessed the diversity levels within and among eleven Greek and foreign cultivars, using 22 morphological descriptors and two different classes of molecular markers (retrotransposon microsatellite amplified polymorphism-REMAP markers and nuclear microsatellites). Our results, in accordance with other studies in the field showed: a) the limited levels of genetic polymorphism within the cultivars; b) the high morphological and genetic divergence existing among them as indicated by the genetic distance values calculated, which could be attributed to selection, inbreeding and bottleneck effects; and c) the lack of concordance among morphological descriptors and molecular markers. Despite these, our analysis showed that the utilization of combinations of markers is an effective method for the characterization of plant material providing also useful diagnostic tools for the identification and authentication of the selected Greek cultivars.