Fruit Ripening: Primary Metabolism - Fruit Ripening: Physiology, Signalling and Genomics - page 22

quality and shelf-life including the ability
to maintain fruit skin integrity (Hovav et
al. , 2007), to restrict cuticular transpiration
(Leide et al. , 2007) and to limit microbial
infection. It has been proposed that dif-
ferences in tomato fruit cuticle structure
and composition may be associated with
the substantial variations in tomato fruit
shelf-life that have been reported in
different tomato genotypes (Saladie et al. ,
2007). Other reports have also highlighted
other process that contribute to fruit
softening such as turgor pressure (Saladie
et al. , 2007; Thomas et al. , 2008; Wada et
al. , 2008) and the possible associated
developmental changes in apoplastic
solute accumulation (Wada et al. , 2008).

climacteric fruits that mediate the physio-
logical changes such as fruit softening and
the accumulation of metabolites such as
pigments, sugars, acids and volatiles.
Currently, no analytical techniques can
provide detection of all metabolites in all
samples. However, the shift from single-
metabolite measurements to platforms that
can provide information on hundreds of
metabolites has led to the development of
better models to describe the links both
within the metabolites themselves and
between the metabolism and other
processes. It is clear, therefore, that, if we
are to improve our ability to carry out
rational manipulations of plant metab-
olism for engineering purposes, we will
have to generate a more complete view
of metabolism as a network. It is hoped
that, in the future, this approach will
allow a comprehensive understanding of
genetic and metabolic networks that
govern fruit metabolism and its com-
positional quality.

2.6 Summary

Much effort has been made to gain an
understanding of the hormonal regulators
of ripening in climacteric and non-

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