Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi, I have done a project that involves banana ripening. For eac h tested banana, I have cut them up into equal thirds and blended them up in order to get a sugar content reading by using a refractometer. I have found that the piece closest to the end (stock piece) has consistently been the ripest piece. I was just wondering if there was any explanation to why this might be.

Thank you for any help.

Hi prih 123,

What an interesting result! Bananas ripen because they give off ethylene gas, but I am not sure why the piece closest to the end (stalk?) would always ripen the fastest. Did you store all of your bananas in the same orientation? Was each banana separated, such that the gas might seep through the stalk more easily than the intact end?

You may not be able to answer your question directly, but if you do a bit of background research, you can speculate about your results.

Please post again (in this same thread) if you have more questions.

Heather

hi heatherl,

Thanks for your input. its a very interesting topic and I am just trying to connect the dots to show some relevance in my data. I put two sets of bananas into two plastic containers at serperate times and the bananas would not be cut until they were taken out of the container and used for the experiment.

It has been difficult to search this topic on the three individual pieces because not much information is present, which seems like this is a unique concept to the fruit ripening process as a whole. It would be great if I could show through my data why this takes place. Anyways, thanks for the help and I'll keep doing research!

Hi prih 123,

This is wonderful, because it looks like you have gotten a novel (brand new) result! I did a Google search for "banana ripening pattern" and found some rather complicated scientific papers looking at gene expression patterns. This one, however, looked at proteins: http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/98/1/157.full.pdf. Maybe the cells near the stalk express the ripening proteins first.

Ultimately, if you are unable to find anything about this phenomenon, it may be that you are the first one to really study it. That is really exciting!

Please keep me posted on your progress.

Heather