THE STRUCTURE OF MATURE GOOSEBERRY (RIBES-GROSSULARIA) FRUITS REVEALED NONINVASIVELY BY NMR MICROSCOPY

NMR microscopy of mature gooseberry (Ribes grossularia) fruits using t he gradient-echo method clearly delineated the ovary wall from the par enchyma tissues which surround seeds in the locular cavity. The gelati nous sheath around each seed, a single-cell layer, was also clearly de fined. The entire vascular architecture of the fruit was revealed; dar k vascular bundles within two large parietal placentae and the funicul i provided the supply to the seeds, and other bundles were present in the outer layers of the ovary wall. Spin-echo pulse sequences also pro vided high contrast images of these histological features, except that the dark line which accentuated the outer surface of the gelatinous s heath around seeds in gradient-echo images was absent. In a snapshot F LASH T1 sequence there was little change in image definition as the va lue Of T was reduced from 10.0 to 2.0 sec, but in the range of 2.0 to 0.5 sec a bright region was revealed which included sections of the in nermost surface of the ovary wall and an unidentified band across the loculus. In a T2 sequence there was no discrimination between the ovar y wall and locular tissues for high values of tau, nor any change in i mage quality for values of tau between 1.0 and 10.0 sec. The image of the ovary wall and gelatinous layer around seeds was enhanced between 0.2 and 0.02 sec.