Abstract
Grafting is a widely utilized agronomical technique to improve yield, disease resistance, and quality of fruit and vegetables. This work aims to assess the effect of grafting and fruit ripening on the production, physico-chemical characteristics, and nutritional quality of fruit from Spanish local pepper landraces. Landraces “Cuerno,” “Sueca,” and “Valencia” were used as scions, and “NIBER®” as the rootstock. Two ripening stages of the fruits were sampled: green and red. Grafting improved the yield and marketable quality and did not negatively influence the physico-chemical and nutritional characteristics of the fruit. It was noteworthy that the bioactive compound contents and antioxidant capacity were more related to maturity stage and genotype, and red fruit had a higher antioxidant capacity than green fruit. However, in all the scions, grafting significantly enhanced lycopene content in both red and green fruit. Another important effect of grafting was the volatile compound composition evidenced by discriminant analyses, which was characterized for the first time in the fruit of these landraces. The rootstock and scion combination could be a way to improve not only the production, but also the fruit quality of peppers.
Highlights
Sweet pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) is one of the most important vegetable crops grown in the world that covers 1.99 million hectares of crop-growing surface area [1]
Grafting had a significant effect on total and marketable yields compared to the values recorded in the ungrafted plants for all landraces (Figure 1A)
The higher fruit yield was attributable to a significant increase in the number of fruits per plant, which significantly increased because of the grafting on all the landraces (Figure 1B)
Summary
Sweet pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) is one of the most important vegetable crops grown in the world that covers 1.99 million hectares (ha) of crop-growing surface area [1]. It is of great cultural and economic importance because of its multiples uses and phenotypic diversity [2,3]. Modern breeding developed good-performance hybrid cultivars that are normally more productive, more resistant to disease and pests, and more uniform in germination, growth, and highest vigor terms [4,5] This resulted in genetic erosion, the declining heterogeneity of the organoleptic characteristics of pepper fruits, and the replacement of using local pepper varieties [6,7].
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