Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) microimaging of raspberry fruit: further studies on the origin of the image

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) micro-images of mature red raspberry (Rubus idaeus L.) fruits and their separated components have been produced under a variety of experimental conditions with the objective of understanding factors which determine image quality in different types of tissue. By varying the delay time between image accumulation sequences it has been shown that water molecules in drupelet surface layers in contact with other drupelets, and in the vascular bundles and traces in the receptacle and drupelets have shorter relaxation times than those in other tissues of the fruit. By performing separate T₁ - > and T₂ -weighted imaging sequences it was shown that the short relaxation times in the vascular tissue was primarily a T₁ effect. This is probably caused by paramagnetic ions because electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy showed significant amounts of the manganese(n) ion in a spectrum of an aqueous extract of receptacle tissue. The cause of the short relaxation times in the drupelet surface layers is less clear, but we suggest that epicuticular waxes or the suberized cuticular layer of the epidermis might be responsible. The appearance of entire seeds, including the mature embryos, as featureless black regions in the images has been shown to be due to the lower concentration of mobile protons in these structures compared with that in the surrounding mesocarp, and not to differences in relaxation properties of the protons. Consequently, internal detail of the seeds could only be obtained by separating them from the fruit.