Paper accepted: Chitosan coatings reduce fruit fly Anastrepha obliqua infestation and development of the fungus Colletotrichum gloeosporioides in Manila mangoes

Today, a paper by our former external joint undergraduate student Tamara Limón has finally been accepted for publication in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. Tamara had done her BSc project at INECOL (Institute for Ecology) in Xalapa, Mexico, under the supervision of Dr. Andrea Birke and Prof. Martin Aluja, and supported by Profs. Francisco Goycoolea and Bruno Moerschbacher from our institute. She used a chitosan sample, which was produced by our friend and colleague Dr. Dominique Gillet from the company Gillet Chitosan and which was characterized by us, to treat mango fruits in an attempt to reduce post-harvest losses caused by fungal infection or insect infestation. This worked very well, and Tamara even observed a prolongation of shelf life in the chitosan-coated fruits. Her work was taken up and continued by others in the Mexican institute who analyzed the changes induced by chitosan treatment in the mango fruits to understand the results on a molecular basis. This is not only a scientifically interesting work. Almost everyone loves mangoes, but the ones we can buy in Europe belong to just a very few cultivars of the thousands or so that are grown in countries like Mexiko or India. And the ones we get are not selected based on their taste, but based on their shelf life. Really tasty mangoes like the ones of the cultivar Manila used by Tamara never make it to the European markets because they would perish on their way to us. Our chitosan may help to bring tasty mangoes to our markets, including to organic food shops!