Effect of chitosan-based edible coating on biological properties and quality of fruit: article / Nurakmal Syuhada Mohd Yussoff

Post-harvest disease of fruits Malaysia are a serious problem that need to be solve in order to ensure the industry can contribute more to the national economy. This problem causes a major loss of fruits during the harvesting process until to the consumers residential. Many invented technologies such as fruit waxing and use of pesticide, have been created to solve the problem, however they have their own drawbacks including use of unnatural ingredients, loss of fruit nutritional value and artificial appearance. Therefore, there are need in inventing a new approach to disentangle the issues by investigating on the effect of chitosan based edible coating on biological properties and quality of fruit. The aims of this research work are to develop chitosan based edible coating and to study on the effect of chitosan edible coating with different concentration of turmeric oil on appearance, weight loss, antimicrobial activity and microbial load towards fruit. Type of fruit selected for this study is strawberry and the turmeric oil is chosen as the additional value in the chitosan coating to inhibit the growth of Botrytis cinerea which is a fungal that causes the grey mould disease among strawberry plant. Through the appearance analysis, chitosan with additional of 10 uL of curcuma longa had the best appearance for three days compares to the chitosan edible coating with other concentration of curcuma longa. The disk diffusion analysis proves that the chitosan with 10uL of curcuma longa had the highest inhibition zone which is 17 mm compares to other concentrations. Meanwhile, the weight loss analysis shows that the chitosan with 15 uL of curcuma longa had the lowest weight loss which is 3.35% after 5 days of leaving period. Thru the total plate count analysis, the chitosan edible coating added with 15 uL of curcuma longa has the lowest total colony forming unit (CFU) which is 4400 CFU/mL and the log CFU is 3.64. Through conducted analysis, the chitosan coating with additional turmeric oil can preserve the quality of the strawberry and prolong its shelf life. It is a hope that this research work would contribute to agriculture industry especially in the fruits production by avoiding the exposure of harmful of pesticide during the plantation and would give significant impact towards supplier as it would prolong the post-harvest fruits shelf life. The study also give another options to the consumers to choose a fresh, safe, natural and high nutrients fruits in their diets.