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- Author or Editor: Maria Eloisa G. Quintana x
`Solo' papaya (Carica papaya L.) fruit removed at different points from a commercial packing house showed that skin injury due to mechanical damage increased as fruit moved through the handling system. The occurrence of “green islands” -areas of skin that remain green and sunken when the fruit was fully ripe-apparently were induced by mechanical injury. Skin injury was seen in fruit samples in contact with the sides of field bins, but not in fruit taken from the center of the bins. Bruise-free fruit at different stages of ripeness (5% to 50% yellow) were dropped from heights of 0 to 100 cm onto a smooth steel plate to simulate drops and injury incurred during commercial handling. No skin injury occurred, although riper fruit showed internal injury when dropped from higher than 75 cm. Fruit (10% to 15% yellow) dropped onto sandpaper from a height of 10 cm had skin injury symptoms similar to those seen on fruit from the commercial handling system. These results suggest that abrasion and puncture injury were more important than impact injury for papaya fruit. Heating fruit at 48C for ≈6 hours or until fruit core temperature (FCT) reached 47.5C aggravated the severity of skin injury. Delays in the application of heat treatment from dropping did not reduce the severity of skin injury significantly, except for fruit heated 24 hours after dropping. Waxing fruit alleviated the severity of skin injury, whether applied before or after the heat treatment. Skin injury to papaya was caused by abrasion and puncture damage-not impact-and increased during postharvest handling of the fruit. The injury was associated mainly with fruit hitting the walls of wooden bins-bin liners may reduce this injury.
Ripe yellow papaya fruit in the markets frequently show green sunken areas called “green islands” (GI). This disorder seems to be caused by mechanical injury in a commercial postharvest handling system. Fruit at different stages of ripeness (5 to 50% yellow) were dropped from different heights (0 to 100 cm) onto a smooth steel plate to try to create GI. The injury sustained was not the same as GI seen in fruit from the handling system. Fruit (10 to 15% yellow) dropped on different grades of sandpaper (220 mesh to 36 mesh) from a height of 10 cm had injury symptoms similar to those seen on fruit from the handling system. These results suggest that abrasion damage was more important than impact damage in papaya fruit. Heating fruit at 48°C for -6 hours or until fruit core temperature (FCT) reached 47.5°C aggravated the severity of GI. Delaying the time of heating from the time of dropping did not significantly lower the severity of GI, except for fruit heated 24 hours after dropping. Waxing fruit alleviated the severity of GI. The results indicate that avoidance of abrasive surfaces such as the plywood walls of field bins is the best approach to avoiding the unsightly GI blemishes on papaya peel.