Impact of Ethylene Absorbents on Fruit Firmness and Quality of Nectarine (Prunus persica var. nectarina) Fruits during storage at Super Market Conditions

Abstract

Nectarine (Prunus persica var. nectarina) is considered as a natural mutant of peach belonging to family Rosaceae. They have arisen from peach tree spontaneously as bud sport. Peach orchards are being replaced by nectarines because of its high demand among consumers. Nutritionally, nectarines are on par with the functional fruit, peach. The highly perishable nature of nectarine limits its shelf life to 3 to 4 days under ambient condition. But being a new crop, postharvest treatments to enhance its marketability is lacking. So as to tackle this problem, we conducted a study to enhance the marketability and shelf life of 'Silver Queen' nectarine by packing it with various ethylene absorbents. After harvesting at climacteric stage, nectarines were packed with different ethylene absorbent sachets such as KMnO 4 , Bioconservacion, Al 2 O 3 , silica gel and KMnO 4 + silica gel and transported to IARI, New Delhi. Fruits were stored at supermarket condition (18±2°C) and evaluated for various physical and biochemical parameters. Observations were recorded at fixed interval of 5 days. This study revealed that among the various ethylene absorbents used, KMnO 4 sachets was found to be better in reducing ethylene evolution rate and respiration. It extended the shelf life up to 12 days at super market condition by maintaining better firmness (3.77N), low PLW (9.302%) and higher ascorbic acid (10.61mg100g-1).