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► Journal BrowserSpecial Issue "Propagation and Post-harvest of Fruit Crops"
A special issue of Horticulturae (ISSN 2311-7524). This special issue belongs to the section "Postharvest Biology, Quality, Safety, and Technology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 September 2021.
Special Issue Editor
Interests: horticulture; fruit crops; post-harvest; fruit ripening
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In fruit crops, plant propagation plays an important role as the number of plants can be rapidly multiplied, retaining desirable characteristics from the mother plants, and shortening the bearing age of plants. Depending on the fruit species, propagation can be achieved sexually by seed or asexually by utilizing specialized vegetative structures of the plant or by employing such techniques as cutting, layering, grafting, and tissue culture.
Sexual propagation entails the recombination of genetic material. In nature, this results in progenies that differ from each other and from their parents. Vegetative propagation is clonal; progenies are genetic copies of the parent plant, and are widely used in several fruit species, allowing the production of high-quality nursery trees with the same genetic characteristics of the mother plant, free of diseases or pests.
Whatever the form of propagation used, the profitability of a new orchard depends on the quality of the nursery plants, as uniform ripening and good fruit quality must be achieved.
When the fruits reach the fully ripe stage, one of the major concerns is to keep them fresh and healthy for a long period of time. However, all fruits are living biological organisms with a respiratory system, and they continue their living processes after harvest. Harvested fruits require adequate and advanced post-harvest processing technologies for minimizing the qualitative as well as quantitative losses. Nearly 40% of fruits are wasted every year due to improper handling, storage, packaging, and transportation. The objective of post-harvest handling is, therefore, the creation of an understanding of all the operations concerned from harvesting to distribution so as to enable people to apply the proper technology in each step and to minimize losses and keep quality as high as possible throughout the distribution chain.
The purpose of this Special Issue “Propagation and Post-Harvest of Fruit Crops” aims to present state-of-the-art techniques recently developed by researchers worldwide. Innovative articles on the propagation and post-harvest of any fruit species are welcome in this Special Issue.
Prof. Dr. Sergio Ruffo Roberto
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Horticulturae is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- fruit propagation
- temperate, tropical and subtropical fruits
- nursery
- seeds
- cuttings
- budding
- grafting
- greenhouse
- post-harvest
- packing house
- cold chamber
- plant growth regulators
Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
Epigenetic aging in almond is associated with vegetative bud ontogenesis rather than cell lineage.
Almond represents a model system for the study of aging -related disorders in tree crops because the economically important Noninfectious Bud-Failure disorder is relatively well characterized and shown to be associated with the age of the propagation source. Proposed mechanisms regulating expression of this disorder, including changes in methylation and/or telomere-length within individual genomes, would be expected to occur in the apical founder cells since subsequent daughter cells, including those in subsequent axillary meristems show an irreversible advance in epigenetic aging. Because multiple founder cells are involved in meristem growth and development, such epigenetic 'mutations' would be expected to occur in some founder cells but not others resulting in a periclinal-type chimera during subsequent vegetative bud formation that would differentially affect axillary meristems formed within the bud. To test this model, over 2400 trees propagated from buds of known position within the apical bud were evaluated for the disorder. Results demonstrate that relative bud position was not a major determinant of expression but rather all preformed axillary meristems within any individual bud showed similar levels of epigenetic aging. Control is thus more analogous to tissue-wide imprinting as appears to occur with juvenility rather than discrete changes to individual cell genomes and subsequent cell lineages.