preview

Questions On Cold Storage

Good Essays

4. Discussion
4.1 Chilling injury index
We previously reported that a 15-d period of cold storage at 5 °C was enough to develop CI symptoms in mature-green tomato fruit cv. Imperial (Vega-García et al., 2010). In agreement with those results, in the present study we observed CI symptoms after the fruit was stored 10 d at 5 °C, but they were more intense after 15 d of cold storage (Fig. 2). As expected, tomato fruit stored at 12 °C did not show CI symptoms (Malacrida et al., 2006; Bojórquez-Gálvez et al., 2010; Vega-García et al., 2010). The highest increase in CI index was observed after 10 d of storage at 5 °C, suggesting that the major events leading to the CI symptoms occurred within this period, at least under the conditions used in the present study. Similar results were obtained by Zhao et al. (2009) in tomato fruit stored at 2 °C for 15 d, who reported that after 10 d of storage the CI index was 3 or 4 times higher than that observed after 5 d. In a similar way, Ding et al. (2001) observed that tomato fruit stored at 5 °C showed the most dramatical changes before the first 2 weeks. Nevertheless, the application of a HWT to the fruit prior to cold storage provided tolerance to CI, resulting in lower CI index values than those of non-HWT fruits.
Several studies have reported the effectiveness of HWT to decrease CI symptoms in diverse fruits. McDonald et al. (1999) found that application of HWT at several time and temperature conditions in tomato cv. Sunbeam decreased

Get Access