Standardizing Postharvest Quality and Biochemical Phenotyping for Precise Population Comparison

Selection of plant material with desired traits from different populations can be difficult, if not impossible, when trait evaluation methods are not comparable.  This is especially true regarding postharvest fruit traits where techniques and reporting protocols can be unique or non-existent for traits crucial to fruit quality and storability.  Moreover, difficulties evaluating postharvest traits may be exacerbated by the dynamic nature of fruit ripening, introducing error even into intra-population comparisons.  With the rise of biochemical phenotyping of fruit quality-related traits, opportunities to standardize evaluation of these and other important fruit postharvest traits are materializing.  Standardized trait evaluation among breeding programs and, most importantly, germplasm collections is expected to allow more precise trait comparison between populations, expediting integration of economically important fruit quality traits into new populations as well as marker discovery.