Comparative study on texture: a key for blueberry quality breeding

The consumption of blueberries has increased rapidly in the last decade, which has expanded blueberry production to new cultivation environments, requiring the shipment of fruit worldwide. Thus, the industry is facing new challenges with consumers demanding better quality fruit all year round. For consumers, better quality blueberries must have an attractive appearance, a good texture, and a pleasant flavour. A prolonged shelf life, from fruit harvest to retail, is an additional requirement for a blueberry cultivar. Thus, fruit texture is one of the most critical parameters of fruit quality in blueberry starting from breeding and must be fine-tuned to provide the industry with a standard phenotyping methodology. To standardize the method for testing blueberry, two types of texture analysers were used on multiple blueberry cultivars. Destructive penetration tests with flat cylindrical probes were used to determine whether fruit texture is cultivar-dependent, and/or related to fruit anatomical patterns. The accuracy and discriminative power of texture analysis across cultivars and selections in different locations were confirmed and the phenotypic variance reflected the environmental differences of the three locations