Pear Research Articles (Page 1)

Pear trees, though self-pollinating, are self-incompatible and depend on insect pollination—primarily by honey bees. The optimal density of honey bee colonies per unit area in pear orchards remains uncertain, hindering scientific pollination management. This study in Zhao County, Hebei, compared honey bee (Apis mellifea ligustica), artificial, and natural pollination effects on pear yield and fruit size. Honey bee pollination achieved a higher, more stable fruit set (inflorescence fruit set rate was 71.52%), increased yield, and significantly improved fruit size—in transverse diameter (90.96 mm), longitudinal diameter (92.48 mm), and single-fruit weight (407.39 g)—compared with natural pollination. Although the fruit set rates and fruit quality of bee-pollinated pears were not significantly higher than those of artificially pollinated pears, the data still demonstrated the advantages of honey bee pollination. One bee colony (containing ~20,000 honey bees) was found to pollinate approximately 3846.5 m2 of a pear orchard. This provides data-supported guidance for the scientific allocation of pollinating honey bee colonies in future pear orchard pollination practices.

Global warming, with rising average temperatures and increasingly frequent extreme heat events, poses a major threat to fruit production systems and food security. Understanding how fruit trees respond to soil thermal stress is therefore critical for developing climate-resilient orchards. In this study, we investigated the physiological and growth responses of potted pear (Pyrus communis) and quince (Cydonia oblonga) plants to root-zone heating. Plants were exposed to different substrate heating regimes, and gas exchange, water status, chlorophyll content, shoot growth, and biomass allocation were assessed. Short-term extreme heating (50 °C for 36 h) caused immediate reductions in gas exchange, severe root and shoot damage, and rapid plant mortality in both species. By contrast, prolonged heating at 40/35 °C induced significant declines in gas exchange, shoot growth, and root biomass, with species-specific differences. Pear exhibited greater sensitivity than quince, showing lower shoot growth, root dry weight, and gas exchange. These findings highlight the vulnerability of pear trees to high root-zone temperatures and the limited contrast between the tested rootstocks. Accordingly, there is a clear need for targeted soil management practices that promote root growth and soil exploration to enhance orchard resilience under future climate scenarios.

Physiological mechanisms and transcriptomic analysis of the disease resistance in pear fruit induced by Debaryomyces hansenii.

The PuWRKY29-PuMYB62 module responds to salicylic acid to inhibit the synthesis of stone cells in 'Nanguo' pear.

The alleviation of pear chilling injury by chitosan-based coating during long term refrigeration is related to respiratory path, ethylene biosynthesis, and GABA shunt.

Study on the control effect and mechanism of Serratia rubidaea B11 metabolites on postharvest blue mold of pear fruit.

To discover novel laccase inhibitors as potential fungicides, three series of myrtenal hydrazide, carboxamide, and acylthiourea derivatives were designed, synthesized, and assayed for their antifungal property. The majority of these target compounds demonstrated significant in vitro antifungal activity toward Monilinia fructicola, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, Valsa mali, and Botryosphaeria dothidea. Notably, compounds 3d and 3l exhibited potent inhibition to M. fructicola with median effective concentration (EC50) values of 0.307 and 0.465mg/L, respectively, which were comparable to carbendazim (EC50 = 0.199mg/L). In vivo experiments conducted on pear fruits indicated that 3d possessed exceptional protective and curative effects. The morphological study through scanning electron microscopy observation showed that 3d caused substantial damage to the mycelial structure of M. fructicola. Additionally, during in vitro laccase inhibition assays, compound 3d displayed remarkable inhibition toward laccase, achieving a half-maximal inhibitory concentration value of 4.86 µM, significantly stronger than the positive control cysteine. These findings suggest that the target myrtenal derivatives hold great promise as lead compounds for the development of laccase-targeting fungicides.

Fire blight is a bacterial plant disease that affects apple and pear trees. We present a mathematical model for its spread in an orchard during bloom. This is a PDE-ODE coupled system, consisting of two semilinear PDEs for the pathogen, coupled to a system of three ODEs for the stationary hosts. Exploratory numerical simulations suggest the existence of travelling waves, which we subsequently prove, under some conditions on parameters, using the method of upper and lower bounds and Schauder's fixed point theorem. Our results are likely not optimal in the sense that our constraints on parameters, which can be interpreted biologically, are sufficient for the existence of travelling waves, but probably not necessary. Possible implications for fire blight biology and management are discussed.

To enhance the economic benefits of the Korla fragrant pear industry and reduce fruit loss rates, this study investigates changes in pear fruit quality during storage under different damage types. An adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), tested with eight different membership functions, was used to predict the hardness and soluble solids content (SSC) of pears stored under various damage conditions. The results showed that both hardness and SSC of damaged pears decreased with prolonged storage time. During identical storage periods, more severe damage led to faster declines in hardness and SSC, among which impact loads and combined impact-compression loads caused the most rapid reductions in pear hardness and SSC. The ANFIS model with the gauss2mf membership function achieved optimal prediction accuracy for pear hardness (RMSE = 0.2207, R2 = 0.9434); the ANFIS model with the trimf membership function yielded the best prediction for pear SSC (RMSE = 0.2016, R2 = 0.9701). This study provides a theoretical basis for optimizing warehouse management and quality control of Korla fragrant pears, and for determining the optimal treatment window during storage.

Aiming at the key technical challenges of complex background noise interference, fruit mutual occlusion, and multi-scale object recognition in natural scene Korla pear detection tasks, an improved YoloV11 object detection algorithm integrating the Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) mechanism and Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) is proposed (ECABiFPN-YOLOv11). By introducing the ECA module to adaptively optimize feature channel weights and combining the BiFPN architecture to achieve efficient cross-level feature fusion, the model’s perception and expression capabilities for multi-scale features of Korla pear objects are significantly enhanced. The experimental results show that the improved model reaches 86.8% on the mean average precision (mAP50) index, which is 4.7 percentage points higher than that of the original YoloV11 (82.1%). The mAP@0.5:0.95 value is 62.7%, which is 4.4% higher than that of the original model. The training box_loss (final) value is 3.7% lower than that of the original model, and the verification box_loss (final) value is 3.6% lower than that of the original model. These results provide reliable technical support for the research and development of automatic grading and sorting of fragrant pear fruits and intelligent picking systems in the field of smart agriculture.

Citrate is critical to the flavor of horticultural fruit and governed by ACO. However, the specific ACO and its upstream regulators involved in citrate metabolism during pear (Pyrus spp.) fruit development remained uncharacterized. This study identified and characterized six PbrACOs from the Pyrus bretschneideri Rehd. genome. Comprehensive analyses of citrate levels, cyt/mitACO activities, and PbrACOs expression profiles in the pericarp and cortex tissues of developing 'Yali' and 'Dangshansuli' fruits revealed PbrACO2 as a candidate gene. Subsequently, PbrACO2 was confirmed as a mitochondrial aconitase catalyzing citrate-to-isocitrate conversion in vitro and in vivo. Analysis of differentially expressed transcription factors (TFs) and cis-acting elements in the PbrACO2 promoter identified nuclear PbrMYB3 and PbrMYB65, derived from whole genome duplication/segmental duplication, as candidate upstream regulators. These MYB TFs, without direct relationship, bound, as monomers, to the same two MYB-binding sites in the PbrACO2 promoter to activate its transcription, thereby promoting citrate isomerization in pear and tomato. Further investigation revealed that PbrMYB3 and PbrMYB65 are transcriptionally regulated by PbrNAC34a. Given their tissue-dependent expression profiles, the PbrNAC34a-PbrMYB3/65-PbrACO2 cascade partially accounts for citrate differences between pear fruit pericarp and cortex tissues. These findings enhance understanding of citrate accumulation in Rosaceae fruit and provide genetic resources for pear breeding.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s43897-025-00177-9.

‘Korla fragrant’ pear has a long history of cultivation in Xinjiang, China, with favorable economic and social benefits. The selection of tree growth has a direct impact on improvements in fruit yield and quality. In order to provide a theoretical basis for the efficient and high-quality cultivation of ‘Korla fragrant’ pear, two ‘Korla fragrant’ pear tree growth forms, namely trunk shape and small-canopy shape, were selected as experimental materials to study the differences in the parameters of different tree growth forms, as well as the effect on photosynthetic activity and fruit quality. The results show that the small-canopy-shape trees exhibited significantly improved photosynthetic activity, with a 60.64% higher net photosynthetic rate (Pn) in the upper canopy compared to the trunk-shape trees. Fruit quality was also superior in the small-canopy-shape trees, with increases in single-fruit weight (29.36–46.91%), soluble solids content (13.51–14.39%), soluble sugar content (25.79–27.56%), and vitamin C content (up to 0.4363 mg·100 g−1 in the upper layer). However, the yield per unit area of the trunk-shape trees was significantly higher than that of the small-canopy-shape trees by 19.32% because of the higher number of short fruit branches and increased prevalence of smaller row spacing. In addition, within the same tree growth forms, photosynthetic activity and fruit quality were improved in the upper layers compared to the lower layers.

This study investigated the phylogenetic relationships in the pear calcium-dependent protein kinase (CDPK) pan-gene family and elucidated its role in the resistance to scab disease caused by Venturia nashicola. By integrating data from eight genomic sets from five cultivated pear species, Pyrus bretschneideri, P. ussuriensis, P. sinkiangensis, P pyrifolia, and P. communis, along with P. betulifolia and interspecific hybrids, 63 PyCDPK family members were identified. Among these, P. communis possessed the highest number of CDPK genes, whereas P. bretschneiderilia had the fewest. These genes encode proteins ranging from 459 to 810 amino acids in length, and are predominantly localized to the cell membrane. Six genes, PyCDPK9, PyCDPK11, PyCDPK12, PyCDPK14, PyCDPK16, and PyCDPK19, were classified as core members of the pan-genome, and PyCDPK19 showed evidence of positive selection pressure. Clustering analysis and transcriptomic expression profiling of disease-resistance-related CDPKs identified PyCDPK19 as a key candidate associated with scab resistance. Promoter analysis revealed that the regulatory region of PyCDPK19 contains multiple cis-acting elements involved in defense responses and methyl jasmonate signaling. Transient overexpression of PyCDPK19 in tobacco leaves induced hypersensitive cell necrosis, accompanied by significant increases in hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) accumulation and malondialdehyde (MDA) content. Similarly, overexpression in pear fruit callus tissue followed by pathogen inoculation resulted in elevated levels of both H2O2 and MDA. Collectively, these findings indicate that PyCDPK19 mediates defense responses through the activation of the reactive oxygen species pathway in both tobacco and pear plants, providing a promising genetic target for enhancing scab resistance in pears.

Transcriptome analysis provides insights into the regulatory role of phytohormone in second flowering of pear.

Phylogenetic analysis of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) genes and the role of PbCDK9, PbCDK17, and PbCDK18 in cell proliferation in pear fruit

Objective Biomass derived from various lignocellulosic feedstocks offers a viable solution for bioethanol production, contributing to reduced greenhouse gas emissions while generating economic value from agricultural waste. The present study explored the production of bioethanol from ripe pear fruit wastes juice using sorghum flour as an additional fermentable sugar. Methods Ripe pear fruit waste juice was prepared by blending the fruit residues and filtering the mixture using a clean sieve to obtain a clear extract. The juice was fermented under anaerobic conditions with sorghum flour used as supplement to enhance hydrolysis and fermentation efficiency. During fermentation, microbes converted fermentable sugars in the juice into raw bioethanol which was subsequently purified through distilled and redistillation at 78 °C. Results Ripe pear fruit waste juice had the total soluble solids of 8.0 ± 0.03 and 8.5 ± 01 o Brix prior and post addition of 300 grams of sorghum in 8 litres of juice, respectively. Fermented ripe pear fruit waste juice with sorghum achieved the percentage alcohol by volume of 6.56% versus 3.94% for the one without sorghum. The results reveal that fermented ripe pear fruit waste juice broth with sorghum produced bioethanol with higher concentrations of 20%, 16%, and 12% for the first, second, and third aliquots of 100 mL each, respectively. However, the fermented ripe pear fruit waste juice broth without sorghum produced bioethanol with concentrations of 15%, 14%, and 11%, respectively. Redistillation of bioethanol with concentration between 11–20% improved its quality to 49%, 47%, and 39% for the first, second, and third aliquots of 100 mL, respectively. Conclusion The present study highlights the potential of ripe pear fruit waste as feedstock for bioethanol production in minimizing postharvest losses and protecting the environment. The integration of fruit growers into bioethanol supply chain presents a unique opportunity to improve their socio-economic conditions while contributing to renewable energy production and supporting circular economy.

Improving the storage quality of pear fruits via treatment with the wax precursor compound palmitic acid

Mechanisms of Priestia megaterium PH3 in alleviating postharvest disease caused by Penicillium expansum in Nanguo pear fruit.

Pruning is a key horticultural practice, which strongly influences flowering, fruit set, and overall yield in pear orchards. This study evaluated the effects of severe (short) versus conventional (long) winter pruning on reproductive performance and yield of ‘Santa Maria’ pear trees grown in an intensive orchard in Algeria. The findings demonstrated that severe pruning promoted floral bud initiation, increased flower abundance, and improved fruit set, with fruit set rates of 40.9% under severe pruning and 37.4% under conventional pruning. Strong positive correlations among floral bud number, flower density, and fruit set highlighted the coordinated nature of the reproductive response. Overall, severe winter pruning enhanced reproductive development and yield without compromising fruit set efficiency. These results suggest that optimizing pruning intensity may be an effective strategy to enhance productivity and sustainability in commercial pear production systems.

Synergistic enhancement of Yunnanopilia longistaminea growth, quality, and soil dynamics using biochar and methyl jasmonate.