MULTIFACETED INVESTIGATION TO UNRAVEL APPLE FRUIT TEXTURE PHYSIOLOGY

Fruit texture plays a major role in apple fruit quality, and it has been major driving factor in the selection process carried out by breeders. The economic importance of texture relies on the fact that some aspects of this multi-trait feature (crispness in particular) are the reason for not liking a particular fruit, and it represents also the principal features appreciated by consumers. Aware of the great importance and attention that the scientific community is giving to phenomics, the first purpose of this work was the improvement of the apple texture variability dissection. For this reason it was investigated whether a combined and simultaneous mechanical and acoustic evaluation of fruit texture could provide a valuable methodology for the description of all the sub-traits related to apple texture, providing also a valuable link with sensory attributes. Successively, this high resolution phenotyping strategy was adopted for a Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) analysis which identified the genomic regions possibly involved in the determination of the traits defining apple texture. A candidate gene driven association mapping approach has been afterwards employed in order to define valuable new markers suitable to predict the dissected fruit texture subtraits in apple. Finally, we also presented a preliminary functional genomic investigation addressed to target novel putative candidate genes to further unravel the complex control of fruit texture in apple.