Affiliations: SAPROV – Department of Environmental and Crop
Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Università Politecnica delle Marche,
Ancona, Italy | Institute of Biochemistry, Medical School,
Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Professor Bruno Mezzetti, Department
of Environmental and Crop Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Università
Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche, 60100 Ancona, Italy. Tel.: +39
071 2204933; Fax: +39 071 2204856; E-mail: b.mezzetti@univpm.it
Abstract: Breeding and biotechnological approaches are currently used to
increase the content of specific bioactive components of plants, but the
manipulation of plant metabolism is still not easy to address. There is an
increasing awareness that multiple genetic and environmental factors affect
production and accumulation of bioactive compounds, but these factors are
rarely taken into account when fruit is marketed. Rigorous and unprejudiced evaluation of scientific evidence requires
a defined set of criteria and methods of evaluation, particularly when breeding
and biotech programs are aimed of producing new varieties with improved
nutritional values combined with high plant production efficiency and fruit
quality. In order to develop new genotypes and commercial cultivars the
availability of new sources of Quality Attributes (QA) and Nutritional
Attributes (NA) should be explored. In the strawberry, wild species such as F.
virginiana glauca and F. vesca are good sources of bioactive compounds, but in
raspberries the introduction of the wild germplasm (R. parvifolium) did not
improve the nutritional quality of fruit. The methods available for detecting fruit TAC, combined with TPH and
other quality parameters such as sugars, total acidity and fruit color, can be
proposed as excellent tools for developing a fast and reliable program for
screening large breeding populations for high nutritional quality genotypes.
Furthermore, NA can represent a useful tool to facilitate analysis of
"substantial equivalence" of transgenic and control derived fruit.
Keywords: Berry, Total Antioxidant Capacity, breeding, genes, selection
Journal: BioFactors, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 213-220, 2005
