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Research Article

Comparative Evaluation of Routine Quality Traits, Primary Metabolites, and TD-GC-MS Volatile Profiles for Cultivar Discrimination in Newly Bred Peach (Prunus persica L.)
Yoo-Han Roh1†
,
Jinhee Lee2†
,
Yeo Eun Yun2
,
Nayeong Kwon2
,
Sooyeon Lim2
,
Kang-Mo Ku1*
1Department of Plant Biotechnology, College of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Korea University, Seoul 02841, Korea
2Postharvest Technology Division, National Institute of Horticultural and Herbal Science, Rural Development Administration, Wanju 55365, Korea
*Corresponding Author
†These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Abstract

Three newly bred peach (Prunus persica L.) cultivars, ‘Hwanggwibi’, ‘Seola’, and ‘Yanghongjang’, were characterized using their routine fruit-quality traits and by means of primary metabolite profiling and thermal desorption–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (TD-GC-MS)-based volatile organic compound (VOC) profiling. The cultivars differed in terms of their fruit appearance, fruit weight, titratable acidity (TA), SSC/TA ratio, peel color, and firmness, although the soluble solids content (SSC) remained within a narrow range of 12.1–12.6°Brix. Primary metabolite profiling revealed cultivar-associated differences in sugars, sugar alcohols, organic acids, and amino acids, indicating that similar SSC values did not necessarily reflect similar metabolite compositions. The TD-GC-MS-based VOC profiles also differed among the tested cultivars. Among the VOCs confirmed using authentic standards, D-limonene, 2-ethyl-1-hexanol, and acetic acid showed cultivar-associated accumulation patterns. A dataset-level comparison showed significant cultivar-associated separation for routine quality traits, primary metabolites, TD-GC-MS-based VOCs, and the combined quality + VOC dataset. Cross-validated PLS-DA indicated high predictive ability for the TD-GC-MS-based VOC and combined quality + VOC datasets, with the combined dataset showing the highest Q2 value. Because the fruits were obtained from distribution centers and evaluated within a single production season, the results should be interpreted as exploratory baseline information for this sample set rather than as validated genotype-level markers. These results indicate that TD-GC-MS-based VOC profiling can complement conventional fruit-quality measurements for characterizing newly bred peach cultivars.

Keywords
cultivar characterization
metabolomics
peach quality
TD-GC-MS
VOC profiling
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Information
  • Publisher :KOREAN SOCIETY FOR HORTICULTURAL SCIENCE
  • Publisher(Ko) :한국원예학회
  • Journal Title :Horticultural Science and Technology
  • Journal Title(Ko) :원예과학기술지
  • Received Date : 2026-06-29
  • Revised Date : 2026-07-18
  • Accepted Date : 2026-07-28
  • DOI :https://doi.org/10.7235/HORT.20260027
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