Elsevier

Scientia Horticulturae

Volume 303, 20 September 2022, 111216
Scientia Horticulturae

Effect of methyl jasmonate on the quality and antioxidant capacity by modulating ascorbate-glutathione cycle in peach fruit

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2022.111216Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Methyl jasmonate treatment maintains better fruit quality in peach fruit.

  • Methyl jasmonate treatment promotes antioxidant defense.

  • Methyl jasmonate treatment enhances ascorbate–glutathione cycle.

  • Methyl jasmonate treatment keeps cellular redox status.

Abstract

We investigated the effect of methyl jasmonate (MeJA) on the quality and antioxidant capacity in ‘Xiahui 8’ peach fruit during storage at 20°C and 90–95% relative humidity (RH) for 7 days. Exogenous MeJA maintained better fruit quality during storage, as indicated by reduced weight loss, respiration rate, ethylene production and total soluble solids, as well as maintained appearance and firmness. MeJA treatment significantly improved the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT) and peroxidase (POD) in peach fruit, therefore, reducing the accumulation of superoxide anion (O2), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and malondialdehyde (MDA). Additionally, MeJA treatment enhanced the metabolic intensity of AsA-GSH cycle, as key enzyme activities involved in AsA-GSH cycle were markedly increased. These MeJA-promoting effect increased the content of reduced ascorbate (AsA) and glutathione (GSH), and the ratios of reduced to oxidized forms of AsA and GSH, contributing to higher redox status in peach fruit. Collectively, these results suggest that MeJA can maintain better fruit quality and improve antioxidant ability through enhancing AsA-GSH cycle, thus suitable for postharvest application.

Introduction

Peach [Prunus persica L. Batsch] has received worldwide attention owing to its high commercial value with bright color, pleasing aroma, juicy texture and abundant nutrition (Gao et al., 2016). However, peach fruit inevitably experiences a rapid ripening and senescence after harvest, leading to undesirable changes in fruit quality, such as decay (Abdipour et al., 2019), aroma loss (Cai et al., 2020a), pigment degradation (Zhou et al., 2020) and nutrient reduction (Yang et al., 2019). These undesirable changes reduce the fruit quality and result in serious economic loss to peach fruit. Therefore, strategies for preventing the decline of fruit quality must be investigated, which is essential for reducing the postharvest loss of peach fruit.

Reactive oxygen species (ROS), produced from oxygen metabolism, plays a crucial role in the regulation of plant growth and development processes (Baxter et al., 2014). However, high levels of ROS can cause membrane lipid peroxidation, protein denaturation and DNA damage, leading to the programmed cell death (Czarnocka and Karpinski, 2018). Numerous studies have demonstrated that the over-accumulation of ROS promotes the declining quality of fresh fruits and vegetables after harvest (Meitha et al., 2020). Fruit possesses an antioxidant defense system to maintain a delicate balance between ROS generation and scavenging. Ascorbate–glutathione (AsA-GSH) cycle, existing in peroxisomes, chloroplasts, mitochondria, and the cytoplasm, is an essential part of antioxidant system for fruit cells (Palma et al., 2006). This cycle mainly includes four antioxidant enzymes, ascorbate peroxidase (APX), monodehydroascorbate reductase (MDHAR), dehydroascorbate reductase (DHAR) and glutathione reductase (GR), two non-enzymatic antioxidants, ASA and GSH. By using AsA as an electron donor, APX contributes to the removal of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). The remaining enzymes are accountable for the regeneration of reduced ASA and GSH through spontaneous biochemical reactions (Wang et al., 2012). Studies reported that the regulation of AsA-GSH cycle could enhance plant resistance under diverse stress conditions, including cold (Nahar et al., 2015), metal (Kaya et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2021), salinity (Kaya et al., 2020) and drought (Lou et al., 2018). During postharvest period, AsA-GSH cycle mainly performed an active role in alleviating chilling injury (Song et al., 2016; Yao et al., 2021), delaying senescent (Tan et al., 2020) and enhancing disease resistance (Han et al., 2021) of fruits and vegetables.

Methyl jasmonate (MeJA), a naturally occurring plant hormone with fragrant flavor, acts as a vital regulator that mediates various developmental processes in plants, such as fertility, seed germination, root elongation, fruit ripening and senescence (Aglar and Ozturk, 2018; Cheong and Choi, 2003; Ozturk and Yucedag, 2021). In addition, MeJA can activate a large array of defense response against biotic (for example, insect-driven wounding and pathogens) and abiotic (for example, salinity, low temperature and drought) stress. Exogenous application of MeJA has shown to be effective in improving the fruit quality, mainly by accelerating the accumulation of phenolics (Huang et al., 2015; Lata et al., 2021; Ozturk et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2019), volatiles (Cai et al., 2020a; Liu et al., 2018) and unsaturated fatty acids (Glowacz et al., 2017), as well as reducing weight loss, browning (Boonyaritthongchai and Supapvanich, 2017; Ozturk et al., 2019) and decay (Saavedra et al., 2016). Studies based on the application of MeJA revealed that the improved antioxidant capacity had a positive effect on quality maintenance in many fruits, such as lemon (Serna-Escolano et al., 2021), orange (Habibi et al., 2019), pineapple (Boonyaritthongchai and Supapvanich, 2017), blueberry (Wang et al., 2019), sweet cherry (Saracoglu et al., 2017) and apricot (Aslanturk et al., 2022). This result was mainly observed by enhanced catalase (CAT), superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD) and APX activities, and with increased phenolics. Although the effect of MeJA treatment on antioxidant system of fruits has been commonly investigated, the regulation of the AsA-GSH cycle by MeJA and its contribution to fruit quality remains unclear.

In this experiment, the effect of MeJA treatment on AsA-GSH cycle in peach fruit, together with the scavenging of ROS and fruit quality was analyzed during storage at room-temperature. This study provides insights into physiological mechanism of MeJA in quality maintenance and antioxidant capability improvement in harvested fruit, and gives a potential strategy to prevent the postharvest loss.

Section snippets

Fruit material and treatments

Nonmelting peach [Prunus persica L. Batsch., cv. ‘Xiahui 8’] fruit were hand-harvested from an orchard in Liyang (longitude: 119°08′ E, latitude: 31°09′ N), Jiangsu Province, China. Fruit were collected at commercial maturity (about 10-11% TSS), and transported to Nanjing agricultural university laboratory with van (20 ± 1°C and 70 ± 5% RH) within two hours. 300 uniform-sized fruit (without visual symptoms of disease and bruises) were selected at 20°C, and randomly divided into two groups for

Appearance of the peach fruit during storage

The color and appearance change are the most important indices related to fruit quality. During the postharvest storage, peaches treated with MeJA appeared more attractive with a uniform pink color, while CK fruit showed an uneven color distribution (Fig. 1). The Fig. 1 also showed that the slight decay symptom in the CK was observed from day 5 during storage, and no visible decay occurred in the treated group. The appearance of peach fruit was evidently improved by exogenous MeJA application.

Effect of MeJA treatment on physiological and quality change of peach fruit

Maintenance of fruit quality in MeJA treated peach fruit

Fruit quality deterioration commonly occurs during postharvest period, which is an urgent problem for the industry of fruits and vegetables since this phenomenon severely limits the commercial value and storage duration (Abdipour et al., 2019; Dai et al., 2021). Here, results showed that postharvest fumigation of 10 μM MeJA significantly inhibited decay, weight loss ratio, respiration rate, ethylene production and TSS, and maintained firmness of peach fruit during storage at 20°C. (Figs. 1 and 2

Conclusion

In summary, the postharvest application of MeJA could maintain peach fruit qualities significantly through maintaining ROS homeostasis. During room-temperature storage, MeJA treatment substantially decreased the accumulation of ROS, which might contribute to the enhancement of AsA-GSH cycle and maintenance of high cellular redox balance. This work clarifies the mechanisms of MeJA enhanced antioxidant ability and provides a promising approach for maintaining fruit quality of harvest peaches.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lijuan Zhu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Validation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Haitao Yu: Methodology, Investigation. Xiaomei Dai: Methodology, Investigation. Mingliang Yu: Supervision. Zhifang Yu: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD) and the Innovation Project of Jiangsu Agricultural Science [CX (14) 2015].

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