Research Group

Vegetable grafting research group

Research group leader:

Dr. Noémi Kappel

Members: 

Dr. Balázs Gábor

Dr. Maryam Mozafarian

past members:

Viktória Bőhm PhD (now working Control union Kft)

Dávid Fekete  PhD (now working Nébih)

Zita Csapó-Birkás  PhD (Carrota Bt.)

Dzsenifer Németh  PhD 

The research group has been working with grafted vegetables (cucurbits, tomato, bell-pepper, eggplant) for more than 10 years. Investigations were carried out mainly to monitor the stress screening improved by the grafting, as well as the changes in the quality of the fruits. So far, 6 doctoral theses have been written from the research results.

Vegetable grafting has considered as a rapid alternative to slow breeding methods for increasing plant resistance against biotic and abiotic stresses. Several researchers have illustrated that grafting commercial-sensitive cultivars onto tolerant rootstocks can alleviate the deleterious effect of stresses (temperature, water, salinity primarily). Since salinity is one of the most important abiotic stresses which reduce both plant growth and yield and most of the vegetable are sensitive to salinity, grafting is a beneficial way to reducing losses production in Solanaceae and Cucurbitaceae families under NaCl stress conditions. Rootstock, scion and their interactions influence on a wide range of physiological and morphological characters. For this reason, we also carried out experiments with grafted watermelon and eggplant plants, where we examined the effect of the rootstocks against salt stress.

The quality of vegetables is defined as size, shape, color, freshness, texture, flavour and health promoting compound. Vegetable grafting has been used for several reasons: improving plant growth and yield, increasing tolerance against biotic and abiotic stresses. In addition to all of this, vegetables produced by grafting methods can influence fruit quality and appearance. There are many conflicting results of grafting effect on fruit quality due to different production environments, type of rootstock/scion combination used, and harvest date. Relatively little scientific results have been published so far on vegetables on the correlation between instrumental and organoleptic properties, particularly, the influence of technology effects, such as storage or grafting. Therefore we also carried out experiments with grafted watermelon, melon, bell-pepper and eggplant, where we examined the effect of grafting and rootstocks on the fruit quality.

Mushroom research group

Dr. András Geösel 

Member:

Dr. Anna Szabó

Past member: