Abscisic acid stimulates anthocyanin accumulation in ‘Jersey’ highbush blueberry fruits during ripening
Introduction
Fruits are classified as climacteric or non-climacteric according to their ripening characteristics. Climacteric fruits, such as apple, peach and banana, generate a burst of ethylene followed by an increase in respiration rate at the onset of ripening (Giovannoni, 2001). These changes act as a signal for the initiation of ripening in all climacteric fruits. However, the hormonal control of ripening in non-climacteric fruits remains largely unknown. Non-climacteric fruits exhibit no dramatic changes in ethylene production or respiration (Frenkel, 1972), and ripening cannot be triggered by application of exogenous ethylene (Janes, Chin, & Frenkel, 1978).
Abscisic acid (ABA) may be important in the ripening of some non-climacteric fruits, such as grape (Berli et al., 2011, Jeong et al., 2004, Peppi et al., 2008, Sandhu et al., 2011), strawberry (Jia et al., 2011, Li et al., 2011) and sweet cherry (Shen et al., 2014). Acceleration of fruit softening by exogenous ABA has been observed in many grape (Peppi et al., 2006, Peppi et al., 2007, Roberto et al., 2012) and strawberry (Li et al., 2014) cultivars. Fruit colouration is also promoted by exogenous ABA in grape (Jeong et al., 2004, Koyama et al., 2010, Koyama et al., 2014, Yamamoto et al., 2015), strawberry (Jia et al., 2011, Li et al., 2014) and sweet cherry (Shen et al., 2014). Shen et al. (2014) reported that silencing NCED, a gene encoding a key enzyme in the ABA biosynthesis pathway, resulted in a colourless phenotype in sweet cherry. These findings suggest that exogenous ABA up-regulates genes related to ripening, including those associated with cell wall modification and anthocyanin biosynthesis (Giribaldi et al., 2010, Koyama et al., 2010). However, it is unclear whether these properties are shared by all non-climacteric fruits, since some reports suggest that exogenous ABA has no effect on anthocyanin accumulation in southern highbush blueberry (Vaccinium darrowii; Buran et al., 2012) or lowbush blueberry (V. angustifolium; Percival & MacKenzie, 2007).
Non-climacteric highbush blueberry (V. corymbosum) fruits accumulate high levels of anthocyanins during ripening, leading to a highly noticeable colouration process (Frenkel, 1972, Janes et al., 1978, Zifkin et al., 2012). This development-related colouration makes highbush blueberries suitable for studies of ripening. The present study was conducted to characterise the effects of exogenous ABA application on morphological and physiological characteristics, especially anthocyanin accumulation, during fruit development in ‘Jersey’ northern highbush blueberry.
Section snippets
Plant materials and ABA treatments
Ten-year-old northern highbush blueberry (V. corymbosum ‘Jersey’) shrubs were grown at the experimental orchard of Seoul National University, Suwon, Republic of Korea.
Six weeks after full bloom, fruit clusters were dipped into 1 g L−1 (±)-ABA (Sigma–Aldrich, St. Louis, MO, USA) solution for 1 min, according to the methods of Jeong et al. (2004) and Zhang, Yuan, and Leng (2009). The ABA concentration was chosen from our preliminary experiment. This study was in a randomised complete block design
Effects of exogenous ABA on fruit ABA concentration
Before exogenous ABA application, ABA concentrations in ‘Jersey’ highbush blueberry fruits were maintained below 2 µg g−1 dry weight (DW) (data not shown). In untreated fruits, ABA concentration steadily increased and reached a maximum concentration of 9.6 µg g−1 DW during the 12-day observation period (Fig. 1). Similar patterns were observed in ‘Rubel’ highbush blueberry (Zifkin et al., 2012), grape (Owen et al., 2009, Sun et al., 2010) and strawberry (Jia et al., 2011). However, exogenous ABA
Conclusion
Application of exogenous ABA temporarily increased the level of ABA in ‘Jersey’ northern highbush blueberry fruits during development. Exogenous ABA had no obvious effect on fruit growth, but stimulated non-climacteric fruit colouration by accelerating the accumulation of anthocyanins. The main anthocyanins identified were malvidin, delphinidin and petunidin glycosides. This is the first report to show that ABA has a positive effect on anthocyanin accumulation in blueberries. However, exogenous
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Basic Science Research Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea, funded by the Ministry of Education (2017R1D1A1B03028749).
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2023, Scientia HorticulturaeCitation Excerpt :The most important thing is that ABA treatment does not affect grape firmness (Lurie et al., 2009; Ferrara et al., 2013). However, for other non-climacteric fruits like highbush blueberry and strawberry, ABA also accelerates softening while promoting pigmentation, which is undesirable during harvest and shelf life (Jiang and Joyce, 2003; Oh et al., 2018). Taken together, ABA is superior to ethephon as a color enhancer to some extent.
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These authors equally contributed to this work.