A new paper, entitled “Ethylene-responsive transcription factors interact with promoters of ADH and PDC involved in persimmon (Diospyros kaki) fruit de-astringency”, was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The first author and corresponding author are PhD student Ting Min and Professor Kunsong Chen. This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Persimmon fruit can be divided into astringent and nonastringent types. Most of the commercial persimmon cultivars in China are of the astringent type. Astringent persimmon accumulates abundant soluble proanthocyanins in the fruit flesh even at maturity. Therefore, deastringency is important for the persimmon fruit industry. Both CO2 and C2H4 treatment accelerated deastringency. 2 ERF genes were cloned, designated DkERF9 and DkERF10, which responded to CO2 and C2H4 treatment. Further studies indicated that DkERF9 and DkERF10 function as activators separately regulating the DkPDC2 (pyruvate decarboxylase) and DkADH1 (alcohol dehydrogenase) promoters to achieve transcriptional regulation of persimmon deastringency. The present research investigated transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in persimmon fruit postharvest deastringency, which provided molecular-level targets for evaluation of different deastringency treatments.
