Advances in the Strategic Approaches of Pre- and Post-Harvest Treatment Technologies for Peach Fruits (Prunus persica)

Abstract

Peach (Prunus persica) is one of the representative climacteric fruits susceptible to environmental stresses, including microbial contamination. This article analyzed major findings from the literature on pre- and post-harvest technologies for maintaining the quality of peach fruit to figure out the strengths and limitations of each treatment strategy. The key implication from studies of pre-harvest agents directly applied to the fruit surface or supplemented as fertilizer was the application of a mixture regarding substances with diverse working mechanisms to prevent excessive use of the agent. The common objectives of previous research on pre-harvest treatments were not only the improvement in the quality of harvested fruit but also the storability during long-term refrigeration due to the short lifespan of peaches. In the case of post-harvest treatments, the efficacy was considerably affected by various determinant factors (e.g., a cultivar of fruit, the sort of technologies, and storage environments), and thus operating conditions optimized for peach fruit were described in this article. Whereas, although the combined treatment of technologies categorized into principles (physical, chemical, and biological approaches) has been adopted to achieve the synergistic effect, undesirable antagonistic effects (i.e., the inhibition of efficacies expectable from singular treatments) were also reported to highlight the importance for exploring adequate treatment conditions.