ABSTRACT
Fresh fruits and vegetables are stored at low temperature to delay ripening, senescence, thereby extend their shelf life. But, most tropical and subtropical origin horticultural crops develop chilling injury during storage at low temperature. In response to chilling stress, different physiological and biochemical alterations leading to cellular dysfunctions take place in chilling sensitive produce. These alterations and dysfunctions cause development of a variety of internal and external chilling injury symptoms. In this chapter, different postharvest technologies using physical and chemical treatments such as prestorage temperature conditioning, intermittent warming, ultraviolet radiation and salicylic acid, nitric oxide, methyl jasmonate, polyamines, brassinosteroid, etc. in alleviating chilling injury of fruits and vegetables and their mechanism of action have been discussed.
