Products & Services

Mealiness in Peaches

Mealiness in peaches is how we refer to that situation when you bite into a peach and it has no juice and tastes like sawdust! A high quality peach can be put into a shipping carton and arrive in the market place with this very undesirable problem. Sometimes referred to as wooliness, this problem occurs due to extensive post harvest chilling, frequently due to long transit times taken to bring the product to market.

OSF aims to reduce chilling injury and mealiness by silencing an enzyme in peaches that triggered this problem. We plan in 2007 to complete the molecular characterization work of this enzyme such that we can utilize our new peach transformation system to develop the first chilling injury resistant peach varieties.