The Effect of Different Doses of 1-Methylcyclopropene on Postharvest Physiology and Predicting Ethylene Production through Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines in Cocktail Tomato

Abstract

Maintaining the postharvest quality of tomatoes, which are essential in the world vegetable trade, is very important; otherwise, storage may cause severe quality and economic losses. This study aimed to determine the effects of 1-MCP treatments on quality and storage time to prevent quality loss and deterioration in tomatoes due to high temperature and to predict ethylene production through the Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines algorithm during long-term storage. For this purpose, same-sized fruits were divided into three different groups. Two groups were treated with 1-MCP (625 and 1250 ppb), and the untreated fruit was the control. Then, the tomatoes were stored for 39 days at a temperature of 20 °C and relative humidity of 85–90%. The results obtained from the present study showed that the 1-MCP treatments prolonged the life and maintained the quality of tomato fruit during storage. The ethylene production and respiration rate were significantly lower in 1-MCP-treated fruit than in the untreated fruit during the storage period (p < 0.05). According to the Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines algorithm, it was observed that increasing doses of 1-MCP inhibited ethylene production. Furthermore, weight loss and respiratory rate were effective on ethylene production at 100 and 43.9%, respectively. In conclusion, treating the fruit with 1250 ppb of 1-MCP was determined to be the best practice for maintaining all quality criteria during storage.