08/12/2022
Carolina Torres, Rene Mogollon, and Jingi Yoo attended the last International Horticultural congress from ISHS at Angers, France. Our researchers had fruitful participation where they did two orals and three poster presentations.
Dr. Torres talked about how climate change and season’s weather variability have brought significant challenges to fruit production and supply chain management in many different parts of the world. She presented how we have described sunscald on pears where sunscalded tissue had significantly lower L and b* values and overall reflectance intensities at harvest, regardless of sunburn severity.
A novel protocol to assess sunscald risk level in ‘Granny Smith’ apple was presented by Dr. Mogollon. This new protocol uses hyperspectral images and is based on Chlorophyll and Carotenoid absorption wavelengths (430, 662, 454, and 549 nm). It is a potential non-destructive tool for estimating whole-apple relative sun exposure that can be used to sort apples according to sunburn symptoms, high sun scald risk, and different relative sun exposure.
Finally, Dr. Yoo showed the effectiveness of phytosqualane in controlling superficial scald and its effect on ‘D’Anjou’ fruit quality. Pear fruit treated with phytosqualane solution only had a superficial scald incidence of 10 %: meanwhile, the incidence in the control fruit was 100%.