Improving and maintaining postharvest attributes of fresh produce for consumer health

The major goal of this project is to provide high qualityand nutritionally dense fruits and vegetables from farm to consumer to reduce food waste and to enhance consumption.Objectives towards this goal include:1. Develop standardized methods and techniques that can be used by plant breeders and industry for screening internal and external qualityattributes that are crop specific. Special emphasis will be on methods that can be applied for high throughput phenotyping and on evaluation of pigments for natural colorants.2. Evaluate the relative importance of specific quality attributes for postharvest storage life, including phytochemicals and composition.