The objective of this study is to determine the sugar, organic acid, and carotenoid content of Crimson Tide watermelons grafted onto bottle gourd genotypes collected from the Mediterranean region of Turkey. The experiment was carried out during the 2008 and 2009 growing season. | Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry Turk J Agric For (2013) 37: 443-456 © TÜBİTAK doi: Research Article Phytochemical characteristics of grafted watermelon on different bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria) collected from the Mediterranean region of Turkey 1, 1 2 1 1 Elif ÇANDIR *, Halit YETİŞİR , Fatih KARACA , Durmuş ÜSTÜN Department of Horticulture, Faculty of Agriculture, Mustafa Kemal University, 31034 Antakya, Hatay, Turkey 2 Department of Horticulture, Faculty of Agriculture, Erciyes University, 38039 Melikgazi, Kayseri, Turkey Received: Accepted: Published Online: Printed: Abstract: The objective of this study is to determine the sugar, organic acid, and carotenoid content of Crimson Tide watermelons grafted onto bottle gourd genotypes collected from the Mediterranean region of Turkey. The experiment was carried out during the 2008 and 2009 growing season. Grafting on the local bottle gourd rootstocks improved the total soluble solid (TSS), titratable acidity (TA), TSS/TA ratio, sugar, organic acid, and carotenoid (β-carotene and lycopene) contents of Crimson Tide fruits. Grafting also altered the ratios among the sugars of Crimson Tide watermelon fruits. Among the Crimson Tide/rootstock (CT/rootstock) combinations, the CT/09-01 and CT/07-06 graft combinations with higher sucrose, lycopene, and total carotenoid content were found promising to increase the quality of Crimson Tide fruits. Commercial rootstocks (Macis and Argentario) reduced carotenoid content compared to the control. Key words: Bottle gourd, carotenoid, organic acid, rootstock, sugar 1. Introduction Grafting is widely used in watermelon production to control soil-borne diseases such as Fusarium wilt (Yetisir and Sari 2003; Davis et al. 2008), to increase yield (Lee 1994; Oda 1995; Lee and Oda 2003), and to promote the mineral nutrition uptake (Pulgar et al. 2000), .
