*2.2. Plant Materials*

Banana fingers (*Musa* spp. AAA group, Cavendish subgroup) ripened to "yellow with green tips", "yellow", or "yellow, flecked with brown", unless otherwise stated [20], were produced in the Philippines and purchased from local grocery stores, and experiments were conducted in the Osaka Prefecture University lab. For ripening stage influence experiments, unripe fruit were purchased and ripening was triggered by 100 μL L−<sup>1</sup> of ethylene at 20 ◦C for 24 h. For all samples, each replicate contained five fingers, and each treatment had three replicates. For fruit pulp slice samples, cylindrical pulp discs were taken from the central section of a banana finger and further divided into 4 wedges. Pulps were homogenized in some experiments.
