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Substantive and concerted action is needed to mitigate climate change. However, international negotiations struggle to adopt ambitious legislation and to anticipate more climate-friendly developments. Thus, stronger actions are needed from other players. Cities, being greenhouse gas emission centers, play a key role in promoting the climate change mitigation movement by becoming hubs for smart and low-carbon lifestyles. In this context, a stronger linkage between greenhouse gas emissions and urban development and policy-making seems promising. Therefore, simple approaches are needed to objectively identify crucial emission drivers for deriving appropriate emission reduction strategies. In analyzing 44 European cities, the authors investigate possible socioeconomic and spatial determinants of urban greenhouse gas emissions. Multiple statistical analyses reveal that the average household size and the edge density of discontinuous dense urban fabric explain up to 86% of the total variance of greenhouse gas emissions of EU cities (when controlled for varying electricity carbon intensities). Finally, based on these findings, a multiple regression model is presented to determine greenhouse gas emissions. It is independently evaluated with ten further EU cities. The reliance on only two indicators shows that the model can be easily applied in addressing important greenhouse gas emission sources of European urbanites, when varying power generations are considered. This knowledge can help cities develop adequate climate change mitigation strategies and promote respective policies on the EU or the regional level. The results can further be used to derive first estimates of urban greenhouse gas emissions, if no other analyses are available., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Tracer studies with avocado tissues indicate that methionine is converted to ethylene at stages of the climacteric rise and the climacteric peak, but not at the preclimacteric stage. The results suggest that the control of ethylene biosynthesis is at a step after methionine is synthesized. The endogenous content of methionine was found to be so low that methionine must be actively turned over for ethylene biosynthesis during the stages when the rate of ethylene production is high. Oxygen was found to be essential for this conversion, indicating that at least one of the steps in conversion of methionine to ethylene is oxygen-dependent. The ability of methionine and its keto analogue (alpha-keto-gamma-methylthiobutyric acid) to serve as ethylene precursors by apple tissues was compared. Chemical and kinetic evidence support the view that methionine is a closer precursor of ethylene than its keto analogue.