Authors Guillén, F.; Díaz-Mula, H.M.; Zapata, P.J.; Valero, D.; Serrano, M.; Castillo, S.; Martínez-Romero, D.
In recent years the use of Aloe vera gel has gained much attention for use as a safe and environmentally friendly postharvest treatment. A. vera gel treatments as edible coatings had efficacy on maintaining postharvest quality with several fruit commodities such as sweet or sour cherry, nectarine, table grape, strawberry, and papaya. In addition, pre-harvest application of A. vera gel showed benefits in terms of delaying postharvest ripening of table grape. With the aim to open possible industrial applications of other Aloe spp. to obtain gels with potential use as pre- or postharvest fruit treatments, the gel characteristics and antifungal activity from 8 Aloe spp., including A. vera and A. arborescens, have been analyzed. These authors concluded that antifungal activity was higher for A. arborescens than A. vera. However, there is no literature on the use of A. arborescens as a postharvest treatment. In this sense, the objective of this paper was to test if A. arborescens gel shows similar efficacy to A. vera applied as a coating to climacteric fruit such as peaches and plums, and the effect on postharvest ripening. Ethylene production increased over storage although fruit treated with both A. vera and A. arborescens gels showed a significant delay on production for both plums and peaches. The reduction in ethylene production was higher for plums than for peaches, since at the end of the experiment ca. 70 and 50% of inhibition on ethylene production rate was obtained, respectively. Similarly, respiration rate increased during storage for both control and treated fruit.
