ABSTRACT

Fruits and vegetables are a signicant part of a healthy diet, as they are a source of essential vitamins, minerals, ber, and other health-promoting compounds. The major challenges in improvement of these commodities is the betterment of their health-promoting attributes while improving quality, postharvest shelf life, marketability, processing qualities, and consumer appeal. To address these challenges, researchers have pursued strategies of understanding key control points in global development regulation or within specic processes in fruits and vegetables. This is informed by the substantial insights into the mechanistic basis of ethylene biosynthesis, perception, and signaling, and the identity of key regulators of ripening that operate upstream of, or in concert with, regulatory pathways that mediate the plant hormone ethylene. In this chapter, we highlight the contributions made in our understanding of ethylene signaling, ethylene physiology, and ethylene signaling components in both climacteric and nonclimacteric fruits. Tomato is the model system of choice for studying ethylene signaling in eshy fruit due to its commercial importance, a rich source of genetic and biochemical information, relatively small genome, relative ease of genetic transformation, and availability of developmental mutants that are ripening impaired. Meanwhile, we look at how the translation of information from tomato to other eshy-fruited species indicates that ethylene signaling and regulatory networks are conserved across a wide spectrum of fruits and vegetables. We also discuss the ethylene additional regulatory systems that coordinate the ethylene production. We nally summarize the future perspectives of research in the ethylene signaling pathway.