Extending the nutritional life of fruit

The project is to develop a freeze-thaw treatment to disable the biological 'engine' (the mitochondrion) of all the cells in a piece of fruit. The cells lose their ability to respire and, because of the resulting lack of available energy to drive the decaying processes, the fruit tissue does not decay and the nutritional shelf-life is increased. The initial target is the extension of nutritional shelf life of prepared fruit and mixed fruit salads. This is a highly innovative concept: to inflict a sub-lethal “invisible” cellular injury in order to benefit from the resulting extended nutritional life.