Improvement of Aroma in Transgenic Potato as a Consequence of Impairing Tuber Browning

LLORENTE BRIARDO; RODRIGUEZ, VANINA; TORRES, HÉCTOR N; FLAWIÁ, MIRTHA M; BRAVO ALMONACID, FERNANDO

Puerto Madryn-Argentina

Congreso; XLVI Reunión Anual de SAIB; 2010

  Sensory analysis studies are critical in the development of quality enhanced crops, and may be an important component in the public acceptance of genetically modified foods. It has recently been established that odor preferences are shared between humans and mice, suggesting that odor exploration behavior in mice may be used to predict human olfactory preferences. We have previously found that mice fed diets supplemented with engineered "nonbrowning" potatoes consumed more potato than mice fed diets supplemented with wild-type potatoes (WT) (Llorente et al. 2010. Plant Biotechnol J. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7652.2010.00534.x).This prompted us to explore a possible role of potato odor in mice preference for "nonbrowning" potatoes. Taking advantage of neuroscience paradigms, several experiments were conducted with mice and humans on the basis of olfaction alone. These experiments showed that "nonbrowning" tubers, in addition to their extended shelf life, maintain their odor quality for longer periods of time than WT potatoes. Taken together, these findings also suggest that our previous observations might be influenced, at least in part, by differential odors that are accentuated among the lines once oxidative deterioration takes place. To our knowledge this is the first report on the use of an animal model and neuroscience paradigms applied to the sensory analysis of a transgenic crop.