Pre-harvest gibberellic acid (GA3) treatments play an important role on bioactive compounds and fruit quality of sweet cherry cultivars
Introduction
Fruit size, flesh firmness and species-specific coloring are the primary quality parameters in sweet cherries. Proper harvest time is the most significant pre-condition for quality product supply to markets. Even one or two-day delays in sweet cherry harvest may result in significant decreases in flesh firmness and serious losses in marketing channels. Therefore, flesh firmness-maintaining treatments are quite significant issues in sweet cherry. Harvest periods may be prolonged through preservation of flesh firmness with various pre-harvest treatments. Prolonged harvest periods or keeping fruits for longer periods over the trees may also increase fruit sizes. Fruit size is the most significant parameter designating market value of sweet cherry (Whiting and Ophardt, 2005). Larger ones are preferred more by the consumers. They are also sold at higher prices than the smaller ones, thus provide greater incomes to producers (Lenahan et al., 2006). Several researchers investigated the effects of pre-harvest plant growth regulator treatments on fruit quality attributes (Demirsoy and Bilgener, 1998, Choi et al., 2004, Horvitz et al., 2003, Zhang and Whiting, 2011). There are several studies in literature about the effects of GA3 treatments on fruit quality parameters of sweet cherry (Özkaya et al., 2006, Kappel and MacDonald, 2002, Cline and Trought, 2007, Canli and Orhan, 2009, Yildirim and Koyuncu, 2010).
In recent years, antioxidant capacity of the nutrients has also been considered for healthy nutrition. Fruits with phenols and anthocyanin are considered as a natural antioxidant source. Sweet cherry is quite rich in these substances and compounds (Kim et al., 2005, Serrano et al., 2005). Phenols and anthocyanin of sweet cherry play a significant role in antioxidant capacity of the fruits (Usenik et al., 2008, Jakobek et al., 2009). The present study was conducted to investigate the effects of pre-harvest GA3 treatments on bioactive compounds of sweet cherry fruits.
Section snippets
Plant materials
Four-year old 0900 Ziraat, Sweetheart and Regina sweet cherry cultivars (Prunus avium L.) grafted on Maxma 14 (Prunus mahaleb × Prunus avium) rootstocks were used in this study. Experiments were conducted in a sweet cherry orchard located in Agricultural Research and Implementations Center of Gaziosmanpaşa University Agricultural Faculty (40°20′02.19′′N latitude, 36°28′30.11′′E longitude and 623 m altitude). Trees were planted in an east-west direction with 5.0 m row spacing and 3.0 on-row tree
Results and discussion
Experiments were conducted with three different sweet cherry cultivars. Since the results obtained from the cultivars were quite similar with each other, the results for Regina and Sweetheart cultivars were provided as Supplementary material.
GA3 treatments did not have significant effects on geometric mean diameter of 0900 Ziraat sweet cherry (Table 1). In previous studies with sweet cherries, the most significant effect of GA3 treatments was reported as the increased fruit sizes (Cline and
Conclusion
As to conclude, it was observed that GA3 treatments retarded fruit ripening and preserved flesh firmness which is a significant quality parameter for sweet cherry. On the other hand, applied GA3 doses resulted in significant decreases in total phenolics, anthocyanin accumulation and antioxidant capacity of sweet cherry cultivars. In GA3 treatments to improve fruit quality characteristics of sweet cherry, species-specific doses should be determined together with the effects of treatments on
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgements are extended to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zeki GÖKALP (a Certified English Translator and an expert in Engineering) for his technical supports for the presentation of this paper.
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2020, Scientia HorticulturaeCitation Excerpt :In 2015, cyanidin-3-O-rutinoside content was indeed highest for the GA3 treatment (Table S1). However, GA3 is also linked to decreasing anthocyanin content in sweet cherry as it was reported to retard ripening (Zeman et al., 2013; Ozkan et al., 2016). Martinez et al. (1996) reported that GA3 application lowers PAL activity in strawberry, thereby decreasing anthocyanin synthesis.