Variation of polyphenol and vitamin C fruit content induced by strawberry breeding

The modification of the lifestyle in modern society has underlined new crucial aspects from the nutritional point of view. Among fruits, strawberry received in the last years an increasing attention, and a growing number of scientific evidence demonstrated how a short-or a long-term consumption of strawberries could be beneficial for the consumers. The nutritional properties of strawberry depend on the amount and the profile of the bioactive and antioxidant compounds it contains (e.g., polyphenols and vitamins). The recent aim of different breeding programs is to select new strawberry cultivars having fruit with high concentrations of antioxidant compounds. In this study, 14 commercial cultivars and 5 advanced selections from the UNIVPM-D3A breeding program have been deeply evaluated for their nutritional quality for three consecutive years, from 2016 to 2018. The concentration of the main bioactive compounds, such as anthocyanins, phenolic acids, and vitamin C, were measured through HPLC-UV. Results demonstrate the high variability in bioactive compounds composition among cultivars and breeding materials and the possibility to generate new cultivars producing fruit with high contents of polyphenols and vitamins, stable at the different cultivation cycles, to be labelled with a compositional claim.