2018 ASHS Annual Conference

Functional genomics is an emerging technological frontier in postharvest crop management. This is driven in part by exponential growth of genomics resources for specialty crops, which include genomes and transcriptomes. These global-scale technologies are allowing insights into responses of Rosaceous tree fruit to modified atmospheres, various storage temperature regimes, and crop protectants in the postharvest period. These insights will allow researchers and producers to maximize favorable outcomes, especially with regard to crop protectant-limited production strategies. Here we report transcriptional fluxes of Granny Smith apple fruit in the early phases of long term storage in response to intermittent warming, an ostensibly organic compliant strategy that effectively reduces the incidence of superficial scald. We observed two temporally distinct classes of gene expression, which were discovered with high granularity sampling and novel analytics. This suggests that long term outcomes on the scale of months may be influenced by gene expression changes on the scale of hours.