High-Resolution Microstructure Analysis of Cork Spot Disordered Pear Fruit “Akizuki” (Pyrus pyrifolia Nakai) Using X-Ray CT

Cork spot is one of the most damaging physiological disorders in pear fruit, causing considerable economic loss every year. However, the mechanism of cork spot occurrence requires further examination. In this study, X-ray CT scanning was applied to analyze the microstructure of pear fruit “Akizuki” (Pyrus pyrifolia), a cultivar susceptible to cork spot disorder, to elucidate the fruit texture alteration between healthy and cork spotted fruit. Results showed that cork spotted fruit had much higher porosity (9.37%) than healthy fruit (3.52%). Reconstructed three-dimensional (3D) network skeleton models showed highly branched pore channels in cork spotted fruit and a low degree of pore connectivity in healthy fruit. Even in areas of disordered fruit without cork spot, the pore throat diameter, pore length, and coordinated core number (i.e., 77, 160, and 16, respectively) were much higher than that of healthy fruit. The structure analysis of fruit core showed that core deformation only occurred in cork spotted fruit. A much more highly branched network was observed in cork spotted fruit cores compared with healthy fruit cores. High-resolution observation of flesh tissue directly demonstrated that pore size in cork spotted fruit (87 μm) was four times larger than that of healthy fruit (22 μm). Altered expression of genes related to Ca(2+) transport and the uneven distribution of intracellular Ca(2+) were also shown to associate with the development of cork spot disorder. Our results suggest that flesh tissue damage likely occurred prior to the initiation of cork spot. The dysfunction of long-distance and transmembrane Ca(2+) transport channels could be responsible for the imbalanced distribution of Ca(2+) inside the fruit, thus resulting in the development of cork spot.