Agricultural practice and breeding have successfully improved fruit metabolic traits, but both face the complexity of the interplay between development, metabolism and the environment. Thus, more fundamental knowledge is needed to identify further strategies for the manipulation of fruit metabolism. Nearly two decades of post-genomics approaches involving transcriptomics, proteomics and/or metabolomics have generated a lot of information about the behaviour of fruit metabolic networks. Today, the emergence of modelling tools is providing the opportunity to turn this information into a mechanistic understanding of fruits, and ultimately to design better fruits. Since high-quality data are a key requirement in modelling, a range of must-have parameters and variables is proposed.
To understand the mechanisms that link metabolism to phenotypes, which would help to target breeding strategies, eight fleshy fruit species were compared during development and ripening. Three herbaceous (eggplant, pepper, cucumber), three tree (apple, peach, clementine) and two vine (kiwifruit, grape) species were selected for their diversity. Fruit fresh weight and biomass composition including the major soluble and insoluble components were determined throughout fruit development and ripening. Best fitting models of fruit weight were used to estimate relative growth rate (RGR), which was significantly correlated with several biomass components, especially protein content (R=84) stearate (R=0.72), palmitate (R=0.72) and lignocerate (R=0.68). Moreover, the strong link between biomass composition and RGR was further evidenced by generalised linear models that predicted RGR with R-values exceeding 0.9. Fruit comparison also showed that climacteric fruit (apple, peach, kiwifruit) contained more non-cellulosic cell-wall-glucose and -fucose and starch than non-climacteric fruit. The rate of starch net accumulation was also higher in climacteric fruit. These results suggest that the way biomass is constructed has a major influence on performance, especially growth rate.
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