Improvement of Water Status Methodology for Leafy Vegetables Reduces Consumption of Time, Skilled Labor, and Laboratory
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Improvement of Water Status Methodology for Leafy Vegetables Reduces Consumption of Time, Skilled Labor, and Laboratory Resources Gabriela E. Viacava & Sara I. Roura & María Victoria Agüero
Received: 19 July 2010 / Accepted: 28 September 2010 / Published online: 8 October 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract When determining the water status of leafy vegetables with oven-drying techniques, consumption of time and resources is inevitable. The aim of this work was to evaluate the performance of both relative water content (RWC) and free water and bound water content (FW–BW) techniques to obtain the water content index (WC) of different leafy vegetables in order to dispense with the traditional methodology for water content determination. By doing this, not only consumption of time is reduced, but also skilled labor and laboratory resources. Butterhead lettuces harvested at different growing stages and stored at different postharvest conditions were evaluated. In all cases, water content values obtained with RWC technique were statistically equivalent to those obtained with the traditional methodology. Instead, water content values obtained with FW–BW technique were considerably higher than the original WC. Consequently, using RWC technique data to obtain water content, the time required to determine water status in butterhead lettuce is reduced by 25%. In addition, fresh plants of swiss chard, akusay (chinese cabbage), and romaine lettuce were evaluated in order to G. E. Viacava (*) : S. I. Roura : M. V. Agüero Grupo de Investigación en Ingeniería en Alimentos, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Juan B. Justo 4302, Zip Code 7600 Mar del Plata, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] G. E. Viacava Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (CIC), Buenos Aires, Argentina S. I. Roura : M. V. Agüero Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
validate the simplified methodology. Results obtained were similar to those observed for butterhead lettuce. Keywords Butterhead lettuce . Leafy vegetables . Water content . Water status
Introduction Water content determination (WC) is a basic and certainly the most frequent analysis performed on fresh vegetables, which are principally composed of 90% to 95% of water. The water in vegetable tissues affects many quality indices, such as firmness and crispness among others, as well as microbial growth, browning, and enzymatic activity (Kader 1992; Alzamora et al. 2000; Isengard 2001). Moreover, water content has economical implications in these products considering that most of them are sold by weight (Jones and Tardieu 1998). Water content has been used to quantify the water deficits in leaf tissue, since it expresses the amount of water present in the plant tissue with reference to total mass of tissue. Also, water content value gives an idea about balance of water between plant and ambient air; however, it is clearly not enough information about the tru
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