Mango is an extremely perishable fruit with a short postharvest time, and a considerable proportion of harvested mangoes become spoiled due to the postharvest decay in mango-producing areas of the world. The current study was designed to evaluate the effects of chitosan on the storage life of mango. Mango samples were coated with 750, 1000, and 1500 ppm chitosan solution, before storing them in the open or zip-bags under ambient and refrigeration conditions for different storage periods. Changes in different physical and chemical parameters were recorded to evaluate the treatments’ effectiveness in extending fruit shelf-life and sustaining postharvest quality of mangoes. The results showed that chitosan coating was able to reduce weight loss up to 65% in comparison to the uncoated control. Total mold and bacterial counts were also significantly lower in postharvest mangos when they were coated with chitosan compared to the uncoated samples. In addition, different fruit quality attributes, such as vitamin C content, titratable acidity, sugar content, ash, and protein content were also retained to a considerable extent by the chitosan coatings. Chitosan at refrigeration temperature (4 °C) with zip-bag packaging had a greater positive effect on fruit shelf-life, weight maintenance, and quality attributes than ambient temperature. Among the different coating concentrations, 1000 ppm chitosan solutions could provide better performance to extend the shelf-life of mango fruit while maintaining quality attributes. Altogether, our findings suggest that chitosan coating effectively prolongs the storage life of mango fruit and maintains fruit quality during storage, and offers promising potential for successful commercialization of this edible coating for mango growers and the industry.

Physiological attributes and yield performance of high yielding varieties (HYV) of rice cultivars need to be assessed by crop establishment methods before promoting a suitable crop establishment method in Bangladesh. We, therefore, conducted an experiment to study the effects of crop establishment methods on the growth and yield of boro rice. The experiment comprised of two factors; factor A: methods of crop establishment viz., dry direct seeding, unpuddle transplanting, alternate wetting and drying (AWD) and puddle transplanting; factor B: rice cultivars viz., BRRI dhan28, BRRI dhan58, BRRI dhan74 and BRRI hybrid dhan3. The experiment was laid out in a split-plot design with three replications where method of crop establishment was assigned to the main plot and rice cultivar was assigned to the sub plots. Data were collected at different growth stages and at harvest. From the results, it was found that growth, yield and yield contributing characters were significantly influenced by crop establishment methods. The highest leaf area index (LAI), total dry matter and grain yield were found in puddle transplanting method. The highest grain yield was obtained in puddle transplanting method due to accumulation of maximum dry matter and production of highest number of effective tillers hill-1 and grains panicle-1. Among the varieties the highest grain yield was obtain in BRRI hybrid dhan3 due to highest number of grains panicle-1 and 1000-grain weight. The highest grain yield (6.21 t ha-1) was found in puddle transplanting with BRRI dhan28, while the lowest grain yield (2.80 t ha-1) was produced in dry direct seeding with BRRI dhan28. Therefore, puddle transplanting with BRRI dhan28 might be recommended due to best physiological performance and obtaining highest grain yield of boro rice.