Skip to main content
European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary
Content archived on 2024-05-07

Controlling mediterranean fruit fly and improving citrus fruit quality by postharvest heat treatments

Objective

The production of fruits and vegetables has reached a very high level in the EC and is an important source of income for many European farmers, transporting companies and traders. In fact, in many areas there is a surplus of production and export markets are being explored. The far-east markets (Japan, P.R. of China, S.Korea Taiwan, etc.) are fast developing, and can become a major outle for the export of fresh citrus fruit from the Mediterranean region. A major obstacle, however, are the strict quarantine regulations imposed by those countries, to prevent the introduction of exotic pests such as the Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratifis capitata Wiedemann. Currently the most widely used postharvest treatment for citrus involves the exposure of the fruit to near-freezing temperatures for a period of 10 to 16 days. Unfortunately, many citrus cultivars cannot tolerate the cold treatment and develop chilling injury. Thus, alternative treatments are urgently needed to expand the selection of citrus varieties for export.

The objectives of the project are:
1) to develop alternative abiotic quarantine treatments instead of cold quarant
2) to determined the fruit fly response including thermotolerance development, the response of hsp70 in the insect and its use as a marker to determine treatment efficacy, and probit 9 for successful treatments.
3) To determine how treatments successful in controlling fruit fly, affect fungal pathogens.
4) to determine biochemical responses of the fruit including induction or maintenance of defense responses against insects and fungi.
5) to isolate stress genes and characterize them
6) to determine the effect of the treatments on fruit quality and organoleptic properties, and to test the successful treatments under semi-commercial conditions.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Call for proposal

Data not available

Coordinator

AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH ORGANIZATION - THE VOLCANI CENTER
EU contribution
No data
Address

50250 BET DAGAN
Israel

See on map

Total cost
No data

Participants (8)