Tomato cv. Micro-Tom as a model system to study postharvest chilling tolerance

GONZÁLEZ C; RÉ MD; SOSSI ML; VALLE EM; BOGGIO SB

SCIENTIA HORTICULTURAE

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2015 vol. 184 p. 63 - 69

0304-4238

Storage at low temperature is a common practice to extend the market life of many vegetables. Amongother horticultural crops, tomato fruit suffers chilling injury when it is storage under refrigerated con-ditions. Much effort has been made to understand the mechanisms of generation of this physiologicdisturbance, but many aspects need to be clarified yet. Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) cv. ?Micro-Tom?is a miniature tomato plant with various properties that make it useful as a model system in plant biology.In this work, the potential of tomato cv. ?Micro-Tom? fruit as a model to study chilling injury was inves-tigated. The effect of postharvest chilling was compared on cvs. ?Micro-Tom? and ?Minitomato?, anothervariety with fruit of similar size. Green mature fruits cvs. ?Micro-Tom? and ?Minitomato? were harvestedand stored during 4 weeks at 4◦C. It was observed that tomato cv. ?Micro-Tom? fruit was clearly tolerantto chilling while tomato cv. ?Minitomato? fruit developed severe chilling injury symptoms and avoidedripening. Harvest and chilling altered the length of time between the different ripening stages, the devel-opment of red full color and smell. Also, it was shown that harvesting fruits by visual appreciation is arapid and useful method for distinguishing the different ripening stages during tomato cv. ?Micro-Tom?fruit ripening. These results showed that tomato cv. ?Micro-Tom? fruit was able to counteract the strainresulting from the imposed chilling stress. Altogether these data indicate that tomato cv. ?Micro-Tom?fruit is a good model to study the mechanism of postharvest chilling response and tolerance in tomato.