S23 - Session O3 - Early detection of apple fungal spoilage: Application of flavoromics

Authors: Amina Benchennouf *, Karimi Solomon, Maarten Hertog, Bart Nicolai

Apple fruit is stored for long periods under low temperature and controlled atmosphere (CA) conditions to maintain quality and ensure market availability all year round. However, fungal decay during storage could lead to considerable losses. Early detection of this pathological disorder is necessary not only in reducing postharvest losses but also to ensure proper fruit quality. Owing to the nature of fungal infections; where a single or a small number of apple fruits may be infected and during long term storage consequently spread to adjacent healthy apples, conventional microbiological analyses do not provide timely results needed by the apple industry. Therefore, there is a need for a faster, sensitive, and directly applicable non-destructive methods, that are able to provide real-time monitoring of the infections during storage. Selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS), a relatively new analytical technique used by MeBioS to monitor the volatile compounds released by fruit and vegetables, is a non-destructive method that allows fast screening of the product headspace both for the aroma fingerprinting and the chemical identification and quantification. In this study, we investigated the performance of SIFT-MS in combination with chemometrics to detect and discriminate apple fruits infected with P. expansum and B. cinerea (two common post-harvest fungal pathogens) at harvest and after extended CA storage. The volatile compounds associated with either sound or infected apples are qualitatively identified based on Gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and SIFT-MS analysis.