Scientists Take Closer Look At Tangerines
March 22, 2012 University of Florida researchers are working to speed up their ability to create new tangerine varieties by pinpointing the compounds that make them taste and smell the way they do.
In the last decade, Florida fresh citrus growers have lost valuable ground to producers in California and Spain who’ve enjoyed success with seedless clementine varieties, such as the “California Cutie.” Grown in Florida, the same varieties have more seeds than consumers like.
But UF/IFAS researchers believe their work is laying the foundation for Florida citrus producers to regain that lost ground. “What we really want is to have a tree that’s disease free or disease resistant for growers but also one that produces a lot of fruit, has fruit that looks good, peels easy, is seedless and tastes so good that people have to come back and get more,” said Fred Gmitter, a UF citrus breeder based at the university’s Citrus Research and Education Center (CREC) in Lake Alfred.
From 2005 to 2009, the value of Florida’s tangerine crop dropped from $52 million to $43 million — while tangerine consumption nationwide was on the rise, said UF/IFAS citrus economist and Florida Grower contributor Tom Spreen.
To offset that shift, Gmitter and his fellow scientists at CREC have been documenting the precise volatile compounds that account for specific flavors and aromas in tangerine.
In the current issue of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, the team describes their findings, which boil down to this: tangerine flavor is highly complex and not the product of just one compound.
Researchers used a gas-chromatography-olfactometer, which analyzes and separates various components of tangerine aroma, to log their sniff-test reactions to each. In five tangerine hybrids, the team found 49 aroma compounds. Their descriptions ranged from “sulfury” to “woody/spicy” and even “metallic/rubber.”
By singling out each of the volatiles that humans can sense, Gmitter said he gets an assessment of what’s desirable in a tangerine and what isn’t, critical base information for breeder
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