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Volatile constituents of Cucumis sativus: Differences between five tropical cultivars

Atiama-Nurbel T., Quilici S., Boyer E., Deguine J.P., Glenac S., Bialecki A.. 2015. Chemistry of Natural Compounds, 51 (4) : p. 771-775.

DOI: 10.1007/s10600-015-1408-3

Cucumis sativus L. (cucumber), a creeping plant of the Cucurbitaceae family, is widely cultivated for its fruit. It is a tender annual with a rough, succulent, trailing stem and hairy leaves with three to five pointed lobes; the stem bears branched tendrils by which the plant can be trained on supports. Depending on the cultivar, the fruits are available in many different sizes, shapes, and colors. They range from thick, stubby little fruits (10–12 cm long) to Dutch greenhouse varieties (of up to 50 cm long). There are literally hundreds of different cultivars of C. sativus, virtually all of which can be divided into two basic types: slicing (fresh consumption) and pickling (fermented or fresh consumption). Flavor impact compounds responsible for fresh cucumber flavor are formed within seconds by enzymatic reactions that begin when tissue is disrupted [1]. Isolation and identification of volatile components from blended cucumber tissue has shown that (E,Z)-nona-2,6-dienal and (E)-non-2-enal are the major components present. Most of the studies on flavor of cucumber have been done on blended cucumbers and are limited to the identification of aldehydes [2, 3]. In this paper, we propose to characterize the whole volatile emission of pieces of cucumbers of five different tropical cultivars using SPME collection and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) detection. Four slicing cultivars (“Showy Green,” “Tropical,” “F1 L-04,” “Pointe Blanche”) and one pickling cultivar (“Antilla”) of cucumber were studied (Table 1) according to their good adaptability to tropical conditions. Several studies had shown that the solid-phase microextraction (SPME) technique for collecting volatiles of blended fruit [2, 4, 5] and slices of fruit [6] provided information comparable with that obtained with other extraction techniques, but was more convenient and faster to perform [7].

Mots-clés : variété; cucurbitaceae; cucumis sativus; identification; plante grasse; flaveur; france

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