engleski

How to kill Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the Prince

In the classical Grimm Brothers story the witch is trying to kill the Snow white with cursed apple, but without success. The prince comes by and brakes the spell by "love's first kiss". On the other hand, the Witch could also use naturally occurring mycotoxin in apples – the Patulin. In our research, we investigated patulin accumulation in conventional and traditional apple cultivars infected by Penicillium expansum. This mould causes blue mold rot in apples during storage, and also the patulin synthesis. The apples use their polyphenols as natural defence mechanism against microbes, so apples with higher polyphenol content should be more resistant toward fungal attack. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of sufficient data regarding the resistance of different apple cultivars to P. expansum infection and patulin accumulation. In this work, we investigated the polyphenol profile of 12 traditional and 8 conventional apple cultivar and their resistance to P. expansum CBS 325.48. Eight polyphenolic compounds were detected ; the most prominent were catechin, epicatechin and gallic acid. The highest content of catechin was detected in ‘Apistar’— 91.26 mg/100 g of fresh weight (FW), epicatechin in ‘Bobovac’—67.00 mg/100 g of FW, and gallic acid in ‘Bobovac’ and ‘Kraljevčica’—8.35 and 7.40 mg/100 g of FW, respectively. The highest content of patulin was detected in ‘Kraljevčica’ followed by ‘Apistar’—1687 and 1435 µg/kg, respectively, while in apple cultivars ‘Brko’, ‘Adamčica’ and ‘Idared’, patulin was not detected. Those results can greatly help the evil Witch to plan next attack on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the Prince.

Patulin ; Penicillium expansum ; mycotoxins ; polyphenols ; apples

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