Assessment of cold stress in avocado cultivars based on visual, physiological and biochemical criteria

Low temperatures affect avocado plants and their response varies across genetic variants. The objective of this study was to assess cold stress of avocado cultivars based on visual, physiological, and biochemical criteria for evaluating freezing injury in these plants. The avocado cultivars ‘Geada,’ ‘Fortuna,’ ‘Fuerte,’ ‘Quintal,’ ‘Margarida,’ and ‘Primavera’ were subjected to temperatures of −2.5, −4.0, −5.0, and −6.0 °C for 1 h in a growth chamber. Their responses to cold stress were evaluated on the basis of visual damage score, photosynthetic rate, water pressure potential, protein content and enzymatic activity. Moreover, the experimental design was factorial and completely randomized with four replicates of each cultivar. An analysis of variance of the results was performed and the means were compared using Tukey’s post-hoc test (p