Exogenous abscisic acid mitigates chilling injury in zucchini during cold storage by eliciting a time-dependent shaping of specialized metabolites Castro-Cegrí, Alejandro García-Pérez, Pascual Jamilena, Manuel Garrido Garrido, Dolores Palma Martín, Francisco José Lucini, Luigi Postharvest Phenolic profile Food quality Chilling injury is a physiological disorder that appears when zucchini fruit is stored at low temperatures, causing a severe diminution of the quality and nutraceutical value. Abscisic acid (ABA) has been proven to be a key natural agent preventing low-temperature damage. This work aimed to elucidate the changes in exocarp metabolites of zucchini fruit during cold storage and the mechanisms underlying the protective effects of ABA through an untargeted metabolomics approach. A time-dependent metabolic modulation could be observed in response to cold storage, where exogenously applied ABA elicited distinct metabolomic signatures. Supervised statistics were then used to identify methyl jasmonate, heliespirone C, and (indol-3-yl)acetyl-L-phenylalanine as the key compounds in the fruit exocarp having the highest discriminant ability. Noteworthy, the untargeted phenolic profile of zucchini exocarps was also distinctively modulated amid the different treatments. Overall, the implication of ABA in accumulating specialized metabolites, having a dual role in chilling injury mitigation during cold stress and increasing the nutraceutical properties of zucchini fruits, was observed. 2024-05-28T08:35:02Z 2024-05-28T08:35:02Z 2024-02-28 journal article Castro-Cegrí, Alejandro, et al. Exogenous abscisic acid mitigates chilling injury in zucchini during cold storage by eliciting a time-dependent shaping of specialized metabolites. Postharvest Biology and Technology 212 (2024) 112864 [10.1016/j.postharvbio.2024.112864] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/92140 10.1016/j.postharvbio.2024.112864 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional Elsevier