**Author details**

**8. Conclusions**

68 Plants for the Future

of cultivation.

tomato fruits.

climate trends.

**Acknowledgements**

no. VP1-3.1-ŠMM-10-V-02-021).

Tomato biochemical composition, nutritional value, colour, and flavour of tomato products depend mainly on lycopene, β-carotene, ascorbic acid, sugars, dry matter, and their ratios in fruits. The two most important carotenoids in tomato fruits are lycopene and β-carotene. Therefore, tomato products and their quality can be characterised by the contents of these elements. It has been established that tomato fruit quality varies due to species, stage of ripeness, farming system, climatic conditions, growing area, fertilisation, and other conditions

In additional to chemical composition, texture and fruit colour are also very important quality attributes of vegetables. Firmness is related to the susceptibility of fruit to physical damage during harvest and storage. For fresh tomatoes, two quality attributes, texture and skin colour, are very important to buyers and consumers. Texture is influenced by flesh firmness and skin

To facilitate and simplify the determination of biochemical substances without tomato damage, it might be possible to use nondestructive methods, such as colour coordinate spectrophotometry and the near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy method (based on the transmit‐ tance principle, using a near-infrared wavelength spectrophotometer). A reliability compari‐ son of nondestructive techniques and traditional methods showed that there was a strong correlation between them for measuring soluble solids, lycopene, β-carotene, ascorbic acid, skin firmness, strength of the flesh, dry matter, titratable acidity, and total sugar content of

Tomato fruits have positive health benefits and contain significant amounts of biologically active compounds, which are responsible for positive health effects. Epidemiological and other studies associated with the consumption of tomato products for the prevention of chronic diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease, confirm that tomato products are a functional food and show that lycopene and β-carotene act as antioxidants. The growing interest and demand for healthy, environmentally safe, and cost-efficient products has driven the research of new technologies in the food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. Therefore, biocompounds, such as lycopene from tomato plant material, are important for agricultural, industrial, and pharmaceutical applications. However, the levels of lycopene and other biological compounds in plant material depend on the species, growing conditions, and

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and Science, ESFA, Lithuania (grant

strength, which can be used as an indication of fruit external quality.

Pranas Viskelis1,2\*, Audrius Radzevicius1 , Dalia Urbonaviciene1,2, Jonas Viskelis1 , Rasa Karkleliene1 and Ceslovas Bobinas1

\*Address all correspondence to: viskelis@parabole.lt

1 Institute of Horticulture, Lithuanian Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry, Lithuania

2 Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania
