S17 - Session O4 - Keynote: Improving crop sustainability and fruit quality through integrated analyses along the food chain

Authors: Anne-Laure Fanciullino *, Miarka Sinkora, Thomas Breniere, David Page, Nadia Bertin

While million people lack access to food or some nutrients, up to one-third of food is never consumed, especially fruits and vegetables, naturally rich in phytonutrients. Fruits and vegetables waste and loss arise at all steps of the food chain from production to consumption. The access to phytonutrients is also threatened with climate changes that impact both yields and the composition of harvested organs. Working on trade-off between yield and quality along the food chain appears necessary to improve crop sustainability and quality and to limit waste and losses. Processing tomato is a good target to tackle these challenges: it is a major crop and an important source of phytonutrients such as carotenoids, and it represents an intensive production in terms of water use. Two examples of integrated analyses will be given. First, we will focus on pre-postharvest relationships and the ability of tomatoes to be processed into purees. For a better understanding of what controls tomato puree quality, we investigated fruit quality in response to water supply, genotypes and ripening stage, and we assessed their impact on puree obtained from hot break and cold break processes. We found that fruit growth and quality were weakly impacted by moderate water deficit in tomato. A reduction of water supply from 100% to 60% of the evapotranspiration strongly impacted plant growth but had little impact on fruit fresh yield and increased the water use efficiency by 20%. Water deficit also enhanced the dry yield, which is a positive result for the industry that spends most of the energy devoted to the process in water removal from the fresh tomatoes. Strikingly, the strong impact of genotype on puree's viscosity and the lack of correlation between puree viscosity and fruit soluble solid content or dry matter content prompt us to reassess technological quality on new bases. Second, we will address the build-up of tomato health value. The impact of drought during the reproductive phase on the carotenoid concentrations of ripe fruits was investigated on two genotypes. A medium water deficit at the beginning of fruit development impacted the fruit composition at maturity. The dry matter contents increased up to 23% while an interaction between genotype and water regime was found for carotenoid contents. In addition, the water deficit applied also modified the fruit matrix in terms of cell size, plastid and cell wall density. These changes are thought to modify phytonutrients bioaccessibility. These findings prompt us to propose a new model for the build-up of carotenoid contents in response to drought.