Expert Comment〡A new cornerstone for postharvest biology of fruits and vegetables: contribution and significance of the FVRS Multi-Omics Database

Effective post-harvest handling is essential to limit the losses of fruits and vegetables, which can represent a significant portion of the produce that spoils before reaching the consumer. This is particularly true in the context of the rapid expansion the worldwide trade that expose fruits to a variety of stresses, leading to considerable losses. Reducing post-harvest losses would therefore contribute to food security without a need to increase total fruit production. Elucidating the molecular networks regulating ripening and senescence of fruit and vegetable is a central goal in postharvest biology, and a deep understanding of these processes is crucial for designing new varieties and technologies that help prevent post-harvest losses. Although the postharvest regulatory mechanisms of model plants such as tomato have been studied in depth, the knowledge gained from the model species cannot always be applied to other species.

High-throughput sequencing and mass spectrometry have generated massive multi-omics datasets that remain scattered across public repositories, supplementary files, or species-specific platforms and lack systematic integration. This severely constrains cross-species comparative analysis and functional gene mining. The FVRS database, reported (DOI: 10.1186/s43897-026-00284-1) in Molecular Horticulture (2026), developed by the team of Yanyan Zheng and Jinhua Zuo at the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences in collaboration with Nanjing Forestry University and other institutions, meets these needs and fills the gap.

Molecular data for non-model fruit and vegetable species remain fragmented and existing databases such as MethBank, m6A-Atlas, and fruitENCODE mostly focus on a single omics layer or specific species and cannot meet the demands of cross-species, multi-omics integrative analysis. The FVRS (https://fvripening-senescence.biocloud.net) is the first cross-species multi-omics platform worldwide dedicated to postharvest fruit and vegetable ripening and senescence. The database integrates three core pillars: a multi-omics repository covering 49 species across five molecular layers; 323 high-quality reference genome assemblies; and a compendium of 298 functionally validated genes reported since 1988. FVRS supports precise gene-level queries and cross-species ortholog comparison, and provides practical tools such as BLAST sequence alignment, Primer3 primer design, and JBrowse genome visualization, greatly facilitating the rapid identification of key regulatory factors.

One of the main interests of FVRS lies in the selection of data around a well-defined biological question, according to explicit quality criteria. Its unique treatment-oriented thematic curation strategy enables cross-treatment comparisons across transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic, and epigenetic data. Moreover, thematic curation focused on ripening, senescence, and preservation treatments, makes it easier to access relevant data.

In addition, comparative exploration across treatments, species, and omic layers, allows the examination of a gene's or metabolite's responses in multiple contexts, thus allowing to link different molecular layers to generate new hypotheses.

Overall, the FVRS database timely supports the impressive progress in multi-omics data integration technology, and highlights the positive contributions of Chinese research teams in developing tools for high-throughput data use in post-harvest biology. This general resource will benefit the whole international scientific community and provide valuable help for studies aimed at understanding the regulatory mechanisms of fruit and vegetable quality, and developing new preservation technologies.

This comment was written by Mondher BOUZAYEN, Professor, INP-ENSA Toulouse (http://gbf.inp-toulouse.fr/en/people/bouzayen.html).