Exploration of Plant–Animal Interactions via Multiple Modalities

The University of Florida/IFAS (UF/IFAS) maintains extensive plant breeding programs for certain fruits like tomato, strawberry, and blueberry that provide an opportunity to grow and sample large populations of diverse fruit season after season. Gainesville (home to the university), consists of a varied and ever changing population, which creates an ideal scenario for human sensory and hedonic evaluations of these fruits over multiple seasons. Understanding how consumers perceive taste and flavor of these fruits, and what specific aspects of the fruits drive overall liking will enable UF/IFAS plant breeders to select and produce more flavorful and healthy fruits through a methodology called consumer-assisted-selection (CAS). We are numerous seasons and three fruit crops into this CAS methodology, and speculate that we will need many more to discover the complete story of fruit flavor and human sensory/hedonic perception. However, our initial attempts to deconstruct tomato, strawberry, and blueberry fruits into measureable biochemical profiles and compare these profiles to sensory and hedonic ratings has illuminated many different parts of the flavor story. Numerous cultivars of tomato, strawberry, and blueberry fruits from multiple harvest seasons were assayed for taste and flavor qualities like (and among others) simple sugars, simple acids, and volatile molecules using conventional qualitative and quantitative methods (biochemical assays, spectrophotometric, titration, GC-MS, LC-MS). These biochemical data were then statistically related to psychophysical data gained from human taste panels conducted in parallel to the biochemical inventorying using sophisticated hedonic and sensory scales (hedonic) general labeled magnitude scale [(h)gLMS] to identify biochemicals with direct association to desirable taste and flavor aspects of each fruit. Analysis of the individual fruit systems (i.e. tomato or strawberry or blueberry) has resulted in three separate publications highlighting the diversity of biochemical composition through cultivars, identification of specific volatiles that positively influence perceived sweetness without the contribution of sugar, and any genetic by environmental influence on taste and flavor. The ability to compare these fruits over a harvesting season and/or between seasons is given by the psychophysical methods utilized. The (h)gLMS scales are designed to enable cross modality matching, which simply stated is a valid across group comparison. The statistical power to compare within fruit type (or an intra-fruit comparison) or time has generated many impactful observations about tomato, strawberry, and blueberry taste and flavor. The same statistical reasoning allows the inter-fruit comparison, which has opened broader concepts of taste and flavor.