Evaluation of a large apricot germplasm collection for fruit skin and flesh acidity and organic acids composition

Consumers continuously report a lack of taste in many apricot cultivars currently available on the market, highlighting necessity renewing varietal landscape grown worldwide. Sugars and acids content largely affect sweetness aroma perception, being an important driving factor consumers’ preferences purchase. In this work, large germplasm collection 164 accessions was evaluated for several fruit organoleptic attributes: maturity date, fresh weight, flesh firmness, soluble solids content, titratable acidity organic acid separated skin dry matter. A major focus reserved to ten (cis-aconitate, citrate, fumarate, galacturonate, malate, oxalate, quinate, shikimate, succinate tartrate) composition both tissues, quantified by HPLC technique coupled UHPLCHRMS. Malate, citrate were most abundant, accounting 98.5% 97.2% total skin, respectively. The tested showed consistent contents almost similar profiles between albeit some exceptions higher than -and viceversa- occurred. This work highlights extremely diversity germplasm, representing valuable genetic resource be long term preserved exploited new fruit-quality oriented breeding programs. Also, better understanding phenotypic will help characterization more effective management selecting phenotypes with improved taste.