NMR fingerprinting as a tool to evaluate post-harvest time-related changes of peaches, tomatoes and plums

- NMR fingerprinting has been applied to agricultural products stored at 4 °C.
- Cold storage induces metabolic changes in agricultural products coming from local and large-scale distribution.
- These changes are different for products coming from two distribution routes.
- Locally collected and large scale distributed plums are markedly different among the three collection periods.
- For local peaches, all the three periods are well discriminated, while large-scale peaches are all similar to local peaches of the second collection.

The time-related changes of three agricultural products, coming from two distribution routes, have been followed using NMR fingerprinting to monitor metabolic variations occurring during several days of cold storage. An NMR profiling approach was employed to evaluate the variations in metabolic profile and metabolite content in three different agricultural products highly consumed in Italy (peaches, tomatoes and plums) coming from Tuscanian farms and how they change with time after collection. For each product, we followed the time-related changes during cold storage along three different collection periods. We monitored the variations in metabolic fingerprint and the trend of a set of metabolites, focusing our attention on nutritive and health-promoting metabolites (mainly, essential amino acids and antioxidants) as well as metabolites that contribute to the taste. Concurrently, for comparison, the time-dependent changes of the same kind of products coming from large-scale distribution have been also analyzed under the same conditions. In this second category, only slight variations in the metabolic fingerprint and metabolite levels were seen during cold storage. Unsupervised and supervised multivariate statistics was also employed to enlighten the differences between the three collections. In particular it seems that the metabolic fingerprint of large-scale distribution products is quite similar in the early, middle and late collection, while peaches and plums locally collected are markedly different among the three periods. The metabolic profiles of the agricultural products belonging to these two different distribution routes are intrinsically different, and they show different changes during the time of cold storage.