Biocontrol of Postharvest Anthracnose of Mango Fruit with Debaryomyces Nepalensis and Effects on Storage Quality and Postharvest Physiology

Abstract Anthracnose is presently recognized as one of the most important postharvest disease of mango worldwide. To control the disease, chemical fungicides for a long time was widely used among fruit farmers, but recently found that pathogen had developed increasingly resistance to it. With people's growing desire of healthy and green food, finding new and environmentally friendly biological control approach was very necessary. In this paper, we provided a kind of new antagonistic yeast which enriched the strain resources and the efficacy of Debaryomyces nepalensis against postharvest anthracnose of mango fruit and the influence on quality parameters were investigated. The results showed that the decay incidence and lesion diameter of postharvest anthracnose of mango treated by D. nepalensis were significantly reduced compared with the control fruit stored at 25 °C for 30 d or at 15 °C for 40 d, and the higher concentration of D. nepalensis was, the better the efficacy of the biocontrol was. Study also found that 1 h was the best treatment duration and antagonistic yeast inoculated earlier had good biocontrol effect on anthracnose. Meanwhile, treatment by D. nepalensis could significantly reduce postharvest anthracnose of mango, delay the decrease in firmness, TSS, TA, and ascorbic acid value, and do not impair surface color during postharvest storage. Moreover, the increase in MDA (malondialdehyde) content and increase in cell membrane permeability of fruit treated by D. nepalensis was highly inhibited. The results suggested D. nepalensis treatment could not only maintain storage quality of mango fruit, but also decrease the decay incidence to anthracnose disease. All these results indicated that D. nepalensis has great potential for development of commercial formulations to control postharvest pathogens of mango fruit.