Search Results (3)

This study aimed to assess the susceptibility of three strawberry cultivars (“Festival”, “Fortuna”, and “Rubygem”) to drought stress induced by varying polyethylene glycol (PEG) concentrations in the culture medium. Plantlets were cultivated on a solid medium supplemented with 1 mg/L BAP, and PEG concentrations (0, 2, 4, and 6 mg/L) were introduced to simulate drought stress. Morphological changes were observed, and morphometric analysis was conducted. Additionally, artificial neural network (ANN) analysis and machine learning approaches were integrated into this study. The results showed significant effects of PEG concentrations on plant height and multiplication coefficients, highlighting genotype-specific responses. This study employed various machine learning models, with random forest consistently demonstrating superior performance. Our findings revealed the random forest model outperformed others with a remarkable global diagnostic accuracy of 91.164%, indicating its superior capability in detecting and predicting water stress effects in strawberries. Specifically, the RF model excelled in predicting root length and the number of roots for “Festival” and “Fortuna” cultivars, demonstrating its reliability across different genetic backgrounds. Meanwhile, for the “Rubygem” cultivar, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and Gaussian process (GP) models showed particular strengths in predicting proliferation and plant height, respectively. These findings highlight the potential of ML models, particularly RF, to enhance agricultural breeding and cultivation strategies through accurate phenotypic predictions, suggesting a promising direction for future research to improve these predictions further. This research contributes to understanding strawberry responses to drought stress and emphasizes the potential of machine learning in predicting plant characteristics. Full article

The cultivated strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) is octoploid (2n = 8x = 56) and has been the focused fruit species of which an increasing number of molecular and genetic research has been conducted in recent years. The aim of this study is to identify the relationships between sucrose metabolism, invertase enzyme activity and gene expression in four different fruit development periods (red, pink, green and white) of two commercially important strawberry varieties ‘Rubygem’ and ‘Fortuna’. The metabolite profiles (glucose, fructose, sucrose and total sugar content) of two varieties were discovered to be extremely similar. The highest amount of total sugar was found in red fruits, while the lowest was obtained from green fruits. Invertase represents one of the key enzymes in sucrose metabolism. The lowest invertase activity was obtained from the green fruits in ‘Rubygem’ and ‘Fortuna’ during four developmental periods. In these varieties, the amount of sucrose was found to be close to glucose and fructose and the lowest amount was detected in green period, while invertase activity was relatively high during red and pink periods and invertase gene expression was determined at high levels in both primers (St-4 and St-6) in the green period. The results of the study indicated that sugar content and invertase activity were positively correlated while enzyme activity and gene expression were negatively correlated. Full article

The aim of this study was to compare certain important fruit quality parameters such as sugars, organic acids, total phenolic content, antioxidant capacity, and volatile compounds of 10 commercial strawberry cultivars grown in the research and experimental area in Yaltir Agricultural Company located in Adana provinces of Turkey. As for the sugar content of strawberry fruits, fructose was identified as the dominant sugar and the highest value (4.43%) was found in the cultivar “Rubygem”. In terms of organic acid, among the examined strawberry cultivars, “Calinda” had the greatest level of citric acid (711.45 mg g⁻¹). Regarding vitamin C content, the highest amount was found in the cultivar “Sabrina” (25.08 mg 100 g⁻¹). Ellagic acid was the main phenolic acid in all examined cultivars (except the “Plared” cultivar), and the highest amount was detected in the “Fortuna” cultivar (3.18 mg 100 g⁻¹). We found that the cultivar FL-127 had the highest total phenolic content (158.37 mg gallic acid equivalent 100 g⁻¹ fresh weight base). Regarding antioxidant capacities, the highest value (88.92%) was found in the cultivar Victory among all the cultivars studied. The detailed analysis of volatile compounds was performed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) and 34 compounds were detected. Among them, esters, acids, and alcohols were found to be the major volatile compounds in strawberry fruits. In conclusion, strawberry fruits belong to ten cultivars showed abundant phenolic compounds and at the same time have high antioxidant activity. Full article