The Physicochemical Attributes, Volatile Compounds, and Antioxidant Activities of Five Plum Cultivars in Sichuan

Abstract

Plum (Prunus salicina Lindl.) is an important stone fruit crop in Sichuan that is increasingly in demand by consumers owing to its flavor and outstanding nutraceutical properties. The physicochemical characteristics, antioxidant capacity, and volatile profiles of five traditional and new plum cultivars in Sichuan were determined using high-performance liquid chromatography and gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The results showed that all plums exhibited an appropriate quality profile for fresh consumption; the new cultivar ‘ZH’ exhibited the highest soluble solids content, sugar–acid ratio, total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, and antioxidant capacity. High sugar–low acid properties were observed in five plum cultivars. Sucrose was the main sugar, while quinic acid and malic acid were the main organic acids. The plums were rich in volatile compounds and had specific volatile characteristics. A total of 737 volatiles were identified in the plum fruit, and orthogonal partial least-squares discriminant analysis was employed to screen 40 differential volatiles as markers for cultivar distinction. These findings offer comprehensive information on the physicochemical characteristics, antioxidant capacity, and volatile profiles of plums.

Profiling of Metabolites in Organically Grown Plums from Norway: Does Location or Cultivar Matter?

“…In the plum samples studied, quinic acid was the most abundant organic acid (accounted for, on average, 57.1%), followed by malic (17.91%), and citric acid (11.1%) (Table 4). This does not correspond with the studies of Stacewicz-Sapuntzakis and co-workers [19] and Lin and co-authors [73], who claimed that malic acid was the dominant one. Quinic acid was the most abundant organic acid in the samples, mainly because it is involved in plant biosynthesis processes, and its content ranged from 2.72 (TR2) to 13.70 g/kg dw (UJ1).…”

“…Plums from Ullensvang had higher TPC and RSA values, while Valor had the highest TPC value and Jubileum had the highest RSA value. The results obtained are in fairly close agreement with the Norwegian plums analyzed by Fotirić Akšić and co-authors [6], together with those investigated in other studies [73,85].…”

The quality evaluation of 30 Asparagus officinalis L. varieties

“…Considering the seven quality indicators comprehensively, the PCA was performed on the standardized data to explore the differences in OPLS-DA is a supervised statistical method of discriminant analysis that differs from PCA (An et al, 2023;Lin et al, 2023). It can be seen that there were different distribution areas between asparagus samples with different stem colors (Figure 3a), indicating that stem color had a significant impact on the quality of asparagus.…”

HS-SPME-GC/MS Metabolomic Analysis for the Comparative Evaluation between a Plum–Apricot Hybrid and Its Parents

“…Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry has proven to be a reliable technique for volatile evaluation. Fruit VOCs can widely differ, but some of the chemical classes reported in research include acids, alcohols, aldehydes, alkanes, alkenes, ketones, esters, furans, and others [7]. Additionally, apricots are rich in esters, terpenes, alcohols, lactones, and aldehydes, while esters, alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, acids, and terpenoids are usually present in plums [8].…”