Role of strawberry cultivars on some quality parameters

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of cultivars on taste and health relating compounds. The experiment was carried out at the Horticulture Department field of Cukurova University with local (‘Osmanlı’, ‘Kaşka’) and commercially important foreign strawberry cultivars (‘Rubygem’, ‘Sweet Ann’ and ‘Kabarla’) under Spanish type high tunnels during the 2017-2018 growing period. The study was conducted with completely randomized design with 3 replications including 20 plants for every replica. Principal component analyses (PCA) were used to explain the variation of cultivars. All examined parameters showed significant variability among cultivar except total antioxidant capacity. The lowest citric and malic acid contents were determined in ‘Rubygem’ with 8.2 and 1.2 g kg^‑1 values, while they were found in ‘Osmanlı’ with 14.3 and 3.9 g kg^‑1, respectively. Overall evaluation showed fructose content of cultivars higher than other sugars. The lowest fructose and glucose contents were determined in ‘Kabarla’ as 2.2 and 1.9 g 100 g^‑1, while they were measured in ‘Kaşka’ with 3.6 and 3.3 g 100 g^‑1 values, respectively. Sucrose contents ranged from 0.10 (‘Osmanlı’) to 1.58 g 100 g^‑1 (‘Sweet Ann’) among the cultivars. The total monomeric anthocyanin content showed huge variation correlated to different colour feature of cultivars. While the highest value of it was found in ‘Kaşka’ with 699.6 mg kg^‑1, the lowest value was determined in ‘Osmanlı’ (15.9 mg kg^‑1) appearing white and pink-coloured fruit. ‘Kaşka’ was superior in terms of total phenol content among the cultivar with 1631 mg kg^‑1 value. When all of these parameters were evaluated by PCA, two components, PC1 and PC2 accounted for 59.3 and 18.9% of the variation, respectively. Also, the cultivars were well separated with PC1 as local or foreign. While the foreign cultivars took place of right side (positive) of PC1, the others were found on the left side (negative). Consequently, the strawberry fruit quality parameters were mainly related to the cultivar.