Detecting and Monitoring the Flavor of Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) under the Impact of Postharvest Handlings by Physicochemical Parameters and Electronic Nose

Abstract

The objective of this study was to detect and monitor the flavor of tomatoes, as impacted by different postharvest handlings, including chilling storage (CS) and blanching treatment (BT). CS tomatoes were stored in a refrigerator at 5 °C and tested at storage day 0, 3, and 7. BT tomatoes were dipped in 50 or 100 °C water for 1 min, and tested immediately. The taste, mouth feel, and aroma of tomatoes were evaluated by testing the total soluble solid content (TSS), titratable acidity (TA), ratio of TSS and TA (TSS/TA), firmness, and electronic nose (E-nose) response to tomatoes. The experimental results showed that the CS can prevent taste and firmness loss to a certain extent, but the sensory results indicated that CS accelerated flavor loss due to the TSS/TA of CS tomatoes increasing slower than control. The taste and firmness of tomatoes were impacted slightly by 50 °C BT, and were significantly impacted by 100 °C BT. Based on physicochemical parameters, different postharvest handling treatments for tomatoes could not be classified except for the 100 °C BT treated tomatoes, which were significantly impacted in terms of taste and mouth feel. The E-nose is an efficient way to detect differences in postharvest handling treatments for tomatoes, and indicated significant aroma changes for CS and BT treated tomato fruit. The classification of tomatoes after different postharvest handling treatments, based on comprehensive flavor (physicochemical parameters and E-nose combined data), is better than that based on single physicochemical parameters or E-nose, and the comprehensive flavor of 100 °C BT tomatoes changed the most. Even so, the tomato flavor change during postharvest handlings is suggested to be detected and monitored by single E-nose data. The E-nose has also been proved as a feasible way to predict the TSS and firmness of tomato fruit rather than TA or TSS/TA, during the postharvest handing process.

Opportunities of Reduced Nitrogen Supply for Productivity, Taste, Valuable Compounds and Storage Life of Cocktail Tomato

“…Similarly to the marketable fruit yield, there was no impact of N reduction by 50% at the onset of fruit ripening on the firmness of the tomato fruits (Table 3). Albeit the fruit firmness decreased after storage in all varieties and treatments (as reported in other studies [35][36][37][38]), which-as consequence of decreased turgor and water loss by transpiration [39]-is a commonly known phenomenon of fruit ripening and senescence, there was no effect of the reduced N supply. This is surprising as N limitation is known to enhance the senescence processes of plants [1], but this is probably not true for fruit softening, as several other studies also report little effects on the firmness of tomato fruits [15,20,[40][41][42].…”

Electronic Nose-Based Technique for Rapid Detection and Recognition of Moldy Apples

“…The electronic nose technology, which imitates the functions of the human olfactory system, has been rapidly developed. Electronic noses can recognize the characteristic information of complex flavors [6,7] and provide superior performance in terms of response time, detection speed, evaluation range, and repeatability [8]. An electronic nose consists of two parts: a gas sensor array and a pattern recognition system [9,10].…”

Freshness Evaluation of Three Kinds of Meats Based on the Electronic Nose

“…In recent years, because of the development of intelligent sensory technology, electronic sensory equipment such as electronic tongues and electronic noses has shown good applicability in the detection area [10]. Based on its advantages of rapid and non-destructive detection, electronic noses have been widely used in many kinds of food evaluation, including wine discrimination [11,12,13,14,15,16], fruit quality detection [17,18,19,20,21,22,23] and meat evaluation [24,25,26,27,28,29]. Based on the previous application, we believe that the electronic nose can be used to detect the different kinds of gases produced by meat with different freshness status.…”