Rosaceae Fruit Development, Ripening and Post-harvest: An Epigenetic Perspective

Abstract

Rosaceae is a family with an extraordinary spectrum of fruit types, including fleshy peach, apple, and strawberry that provide unique contributions to a healthy diet for consumers, and represent an excellent model for studying fruit patterning and development. In recent years, many efforts have been made to unravel regulatory mechanism underlying the hormonal, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic changes occurring during Rosaceae fruit development. More recently, several studies on fleshy (tomato) and dry (Arabidopsis) fruit model have contributed to a better understanding of epigenetic mechanisms underlying important heritable crop traits, such as ripening and stress response. In this context and summing up the results obtained so far, this review aims to collect the available information on epigenetic mechanisms that may provide an additional level in gene transcription regulation, thus influencing and driving the entire Rosaceae fruit developmental process. The whole body of information suggests that Rosaceae fruit could become also a model for studying the epigenetic basis of economically important phenotypes, allowing for their more efficient exploitation in plant breeding.

Stone Fruit as Biofactories of Phytochemicals With Potential Roles in Human Nutrition and Health

“…The main actors (TF) involved in the transition from fruit growth to ripening have been identified ( Giovannoni, 2007 ), and epigenetic regulation of the targets of these master regulators has also been described in tomato ( Giovannoni et al., 2017 ). Regarding postharvest, epigenetic regulation of the senescence process has been explored in tomato, strawberry, and citrus ( Farinati et al., 2017 ). In comparison, in stone fruits information is scarce, but it is starting to emerge ( Fresnedo-Ramírez et al., 2017 ; Ma et al., 2018 ).…”

Comparative transcriptome analyses of fruit development among pears, peaches, and strawberries provide new insights into single sigmoid patterns

“…These results revealed that pear, peach, and strawberry fruits underwent extensive cell division before 42, 21, and 19 DAFB, respectively, then underwent cell enlargement. In addition, both the single and double sigmoid curve occurred after these days, we concluded that both single and double sigmoid patterns were a result of cell expansion, not cell division [1][2][3][4].…”

“…Within the Rosaceae, different fleshy fruit types showed two different fruit growth patterns. Pome fruits such as apple and pear exhibit a single sigmoid pattern in which fruits undergo extensive cell division during the first few weeks immediately following fertilization, after which almost all growth is due to cell enlargement [1][2][3][4]. Stone fruits such as late-maturing peach exhibit a double sigmoid pattern in which two rapid-growth stages are separated by a slow-growth stage [2,5,6].…”

Beyond Ethylene: New Insights Regarding the Role of Alternative Oxidase in the Respiratory Climacteric

“…Recent independent studies, as well as reviews, have indicated that such modifications to the classical climacteric ripening implicate several pathways that operate concomitantly with ethylene biosynthesis and perception, including AOX respiration, signaling by reactive oxygen species (ROS), and pathways that may be triggered by changes in epigenetic signatures (Perotti et al, 2014;Kumar et al, 2016;Farinati et al, 2017;Bucher et al, 2018;Hendrickson et al, 2019;Hewitt et al, 2020b). New advances in genome editing have provided further insight regarding potential sites for variation in ripening, as manipulation of upstream transcriptional regulators (Ito et al, 2017) leads to alterations in fruit texture, photoperiodic response, and posttranscriptional regulation of ripening-related genetic elements (Martín-Pizarro and Posé, 2018).…”