Abstract The phenylketonuria - quality of life (PKU-QOL) questionnaire was developed to assess the impact of phenylketonuria (PKU) and its treatment on the health-related quality of life (HRQL) of patients and their caregivers. Available in four versions (child, adolescent, adult and parent), it was developed and validated in eight countries. The objective of this study was to linguistically validate the PKU-QOL questionnaire in Brazilian Portuguese for use in Brazil by clinicians who take care of PKU patients. The translation method used a standard linguistic validation process. The British English version served as a basis for translation. No major cultural or semantic issues were found during the process. The main difficulty was the use of the acronym “PKU” in the first translations. During the cognitive interviews, respondents made the confusion between the disease itself and the food supplement since it is written “PKU” or “COMIDA-PKU” on the packaging of the product. To overcome this issue, it was decided to use fenilcetonuria (fenil) or fenil alone throughout all versions. The PKU-QOL will be valuable for Brazilian healthcare providers in individualizing treatment and managing patients with PKU.

Abstract Globe artichoke (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus) is a cross-pollinated, highly heterozygous species, which is conventionally propagated vegetatively. A scheme is described here which combines phenotypic with genotypic selection to fast track the development of a seed-propagated variety. The scheme was tested by making three selections, on a phenotypic basis, from a Brazilian seed-propagated variety showing an high phenotypic variation. The genetic relatedness as well as the heterozygosity of the material in study, in respect to standard variety representatives, was initially assessed with a wide set of microsatellite markers. Afterwards, an AFLP-based selection demonstrated to provide a practical and cheap means of conducting marker assisted breeding, which can be easily adopted also in laboratories of small seed companies. The selection approach described here could be readily adopted also to convert current vegetatively propagated landraces into seed-propagated varieties.