Sweet & Sour Melon

Sweet and sour melon

Melon ( Cucumis melo L .) is a commercial crop grown worldwide. Cucumis melo L. includes a very wide variety of cultivars producing fruits of different shape, external appearance and flesh color. Commercial melons generally produce sweet fruits known, for example, as Charentais, Cantaloupe, Honeydew, Amarello, Piel de Sapo, Kirkagak, Hamy, Ananas, Galia and Oriental. These are usually consumed as dessert fruits. Cucumis melo L. also includes non-sweet, commercial cultivars consumed in the Middle to Far East and are used in salads and when cooking or pickling. These include, for example, Alficoz, Faqqous, Chito, Conomon (Pitrat et al (2000) Eucarpia meeting Proceedings: 29-36).

The taste and aroma of melon fruits is determined by a number of factors, including sugars, aroma volatiles, free amino acids, organic acids, pH and soluble minerals (Wang et al. (1996) J. Agric. Food Chem. 44: 210-216). Among the four primary tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty), sweetness is considered to be a very important component of good tasting melon fruits. The flesh of sweet melon fruits has a pH usually above 6.0, but melon accessions are also known to have a much lower pH, as low as below 5.0.

The native trait referred to as sweet and sour melon introduces to melon plant fruits a new pleasant taste in which such fruits have a novel balanced composition of organic acid content, low pH and high sugar contents.

The present invention relates to novel melon plants capable of producing fruits with a new pleasant taste and to the seeds of these. It further relates to fruits of melon plants of the present invention, in which such fruits have specific organic acid content, low pH and high sugar contents. The present invention also further relates to methods of making and using plants and fruits disclosed here.

Varieties

Syngenta commercial varieties that contain the Sweet and Sour trait: Citrum

Patent

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Financial Terms

Based on FRAND license terms Syngenta asks a 5% royalty on net sales for the use of this resistance locus in your commercial varieties.

You can review an example of a standard license agreement by clicking on the link: Standard License Agreement

Access to trait know-how and molecular markers to increase the efficiency with which the trait can be introduced into the market will be negotiated as a lump-sum or an additional royalty rate.

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Patent Documents

id00000002015093.pdf 4.18 mb

Materials and Know How

To speak to us about how we can best support you in gaining access to this native trait via TraitAbility and how it can benefit your breeding programs please contact us for more detailed information. If you are a member of the International Licensing Platform you can obtain a basic patent license directly through that platform.

As Syngenta continuously produces new materials and increases its know-how on this trait, we can offer a licensee additional know-how and material related to this native trait further to the patent license through TraitAbility. This can be important for licensees that intend to use the trait in their commercial variety production. Furthermore, early access to Syngenta material containing the trait can help in getting this trait earlier in your varieties.

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Sweet & Sour Melon

Sweet and sour melon

Financial Terms