BACKGROUND Postharvest application of fungicide prochloraz and hot-water dip are commercially practiced to control postharvest diseases in mangoes. Owing to the increasing consumer demand for organically produced fruit, the search for natural environmentally friendly alternative products and processes has become important for the fruit industry. This study evaluated the combined effect of 1-met...

Purpose of review: This article reviews studies conducted on maturity indices, climacteric behaviour, artificial ripening, and preand postharvest treatments, which affect the shelf-life, packaging, storage and postharvest pathology of ber fruits. Findings: Ber fruits show climacteric respiration behaviour. Various maturity indices including colour, total soluble solids, harvesting date, days fr...

Reverse Transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) is one of the most important techniques for gene expression profiling due to its high sensibility and reproducibility. However, the reliability of the results is highly dependent on data normalization, performed by comparisons between the expression profiles of the genes of interest against those of constitutively expressed, reference genes. Alth...

Prof. Francisco Artés is an agricultural engineer (UPV, Valencia) and refrigeration engineer (IFFI, Paris). He is Director of the Plant Biotechnology Institute (since 2001), Professor of Food Technology and Head of the Postharvest and Refrigeration Group (PRG) at the Department of Food Engineering of the Technical University of Cartagena. He was Director (1992-1994) of CEBAS (Centre for Applied...

Plant-specific WRKY transcription factors (TFs) have been implicated to function as regulators of leaf senescence, but their association with postharvest leaf senescence of economically important leafy vegetables, is poorly understood. In this work, the characterization of a Group IIe WRKY TF, BrWRKY65, from Chinese flowering cabbage (Brassica rapa var. parachinensis) is reported. The expressio...

Pitaya (Hylocereus undatus) is a non-climacteric fruit that reaches its best eating quality when harvested ripe, decreasing thereafter during storage (CHIEN et al., 2007). As a new crop, there have been limited studies focused on extending the postharvest quality of pitaya fruit. The main postharvest problems of pitaya fruit are mechanical injury, chilling injury, decay, and water loss (NERD et...

AIMS To investigate the effect of antagonistic yeast Pichia membranaefaciens on alleviating oxidative stress caused by Penicillium expansum in sweet cherry fruit. METHODS AND RESULTS At two maturity stages of sweet cherry fruit, P. membranaefaciens restrained blue mold rot caused by Pe. expansum. There was not any decay in yeast-treated fruit even at 5 days after inoculation. Carbonylated pro...

Crown rot caused by fungal pathogen is the most prevalent postharvest disease in banana fruit that results significant economic losses during transportation, storage, and ripening period. Antifungal effects of ultraviolet C (UVC) irradiation at doses varied from 0.01 to 0.30 kJ m-2 were investigated in controlling postharvest crown rot disease, maintenance of fruit quality, and the effects on a...

INTRODUCTION. THE somewhat arbitrary classification of the wood decays caused by fungi into " brown " and " white " rots has in recent years been the subject of controversy, as it has been suggested that more accurate classification can be based on strictly chemical evidence regarding the effects of the various wood-rotting fungi on wood substance. So far as "brown" rots are concerned a suffici...

The postharvest quality of tomato fruit harvested at the pink stage and dipped in 3 different concentrations of CaCl2 for different dip times (30, 20 and 10 minutes) were studied. Tomato fruits dipped in 6% CaCl2 for 30 and 20 minutes retained significantly (P < 0.05) higher level of firmness, titrable acidity and vitamin C than fruits dipped in 2% CaCl2 and the control. The calcium chloride tr...