Regulation of the central metabolism of pear during hypoxia

Pome fruit, like apple and pear, are stored year round under well controlled low oxygen conditions. By doing so, man is challenging the fruit to its extremes by, on one hand, reducing the fruit's metabolism to extend its storage life as much as possible and, on the other hand, not stressing the fruit too much and thus inducing storage disorders. The latter are believed to be initiated by a localised imbalance in the energy metabolism, causing a shortage of available energy for the cell to carry out fundamental maintenance processes. This leads to cell death, fruit disorders and large economic storage losses. This project focuses on the interplay between the respiration metabolism of the fruit and gas transport with respect to inducing low oxygen stress during pear storage. We will focus on how pear fruit is able to flexibly adapt to the imposed oxygen str ess. To meet this objective, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted.

Keywords:central metabolism, hypoxia, experimental design, biophotonics

Disciplines:Plant biology, Agricultural plant production, Horticultural production, Applied mathematics in specific fields, Statistics and numerical methods, Agriculture, land and farm management, Biotechnology for agriculture, forestry, fisheries and allied sciences, Fisheries sciences