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Keywords: Arils, Seed, Opening, Ripening, n Blighia sapidan
In Jamaica, ackee fruit is a national symbol and a key ingredient in the national dish, ackee and saltfish. The present study is aiming to profile the metabolome and understand the metabolic perturbations in arils and seeds of ackee due to different opening and ripening stages using gas chromatography—mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. The profile of the metabolome showed the presence of sixteen (16) mono and disaccharides, nine (9) sugar alcohols, sixteen (16) fatty acids, twenty-four (24) amino acids and twenty-eight (28) organic acids. Among carbohydrates glucose, inositol and myo-inositol were the most predominant, while butyric acid, stearic acid and oleic acid were the most predominant among fatty acids either in arils or seeds. On the other hand, the partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) has found 14 marker metabolites in arils and seeds for the different opening and ripening stages, and these markers belong to sugars (1), polyols (2), amino acids (2), fatty acids (3) and organic acids (5). PLS-Da also showed that nine (9) and seven (7) markers were up-regulated, while five (5) and seven (7) were own-regulated in arils and seed respectively. Overall, our finding in this present study demonstrated that gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC–MS) based metabolomics approach can be valuable tool to understand ripening of ackee fruit.
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Department of Life Sciences, The University of the West Indies, Kingston 7, Jamaica