Traceability of sustainable management practices through fruit metabolomic and ionomic profile

The consumer demand for healthy environmentally friendly food products has today become a very high priority. Fruit and vegetable production is one of the most important in the Italian agri-food system, thus it needs to assure high quality products. The majority of elements that make up a plant, except for carbon and oxygen, are obtained from soil through the roots. Thus, the elemental composition of a tissue, i.e. the ionome, is mainly a consequence of plant-soil environment interactions. This study examined whether different soil management practices generated different metabolomic and ionomic profiles in peach fruit as assessed through HPLC/MS and TXRF analyses. Fruits (30 per treatment) were sampled at harvest from sustainable orchards (e.g. no-tillage, mulching of pruning residues, calculated irrigation, compost supply and cover crops) receiving a total of about 8 t ha-1 carbon per year, and from conventional orchards (soil tillage, burning of pruning residues, mineral fertilization, empirical irrigation). Preliminary results show that the management options impacted the metabolomic and ionomic profiles of fruit. Particularly, in fruit picked at the sustainable orchard, the content of certain key metabolites for human health and food industry were higher than that in conventional fruit (e.g. +5% for quinic acid and derivatives, +30% for gluconic acid and +15% for amygdalin). Similarly, the ionomic profile of fruit was differentiated by the orchard management highlighting that some mineral elements (e.g. Mn, Ni, Cu and Zn) could be associated to the different management options. The identification of ionomic and metabolomic profile of fruit seems to be a promising approach that could be used for characterization of an environmentally friendly product being conceivably supportive for the implementation of quality product certification strategy.