THE IMPACT OF OPEN-FIELD AND PROTECTED CULTIVATION ON BIOCHEMICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF BANANAS (Musa spp. AAA)

Bananas have been grown in both open-field and protected cultivation in the subtropics. There are a very lim-ited number of publications focusing on the impact of cultivation systems on the physico-chemical character-istics of bananas. For this reason, we assessed these fruit characteristics including sugars, malic acid, L-ascor-bic acid, macro and micro nutrients well as fat and fatty acids of green and ripe bananas (Musa spp. AAA) in both cultivation systems. Experimental results have showed that many parameters affected the fruit ripening stage more than the cultivation system. Sucrose was the most abundant sugar followed by fructose and glu-cose in both the unripe and the ripe fruit stages. Sugar content, malic acid and L-ascorbic acid were higher in the ripe stage compared to the green stage. The cultivation system affected only glucose content, however, malic acid and L-ascorbic acid were not affected by the cultivation system. The most abundant macro and micro elements found were potassium and iron respectively. Cultivation system affected only potassium, zinc and manganese contents. Nitrogen and phosphorous, were found to be higher in the ripe stage. However, calcium, zinc, manganese and cupper were higher in the unripe stage. The fatty acid showed low value in the unripe stage for both cultivation systems. The concentration of MUFAs were found to be higher in the unripe stage for open-field condition while SFAs and PUFAs percentage were found to be higher in both cultivation systems. Experimental results clearly showed that physico-chemical characteristics of bananas were mainly affected by the ripening stage while the cultivation systems only affected a few characteristics.