Secondly, three groups of fruit were treated with 0, 50, 100 mL L 1
ethephon respectively for 1 min, followed by the optimized 1-MCP treatment, and then stored at 25 1 C. Fruit was monitored by periodical measures of ripening rate, firmness and peel color for a minimum of fifteen fingers. All treatments were conducted with three biological replicates and every experiment was conducted twice independently. Thirdly, another experiment was conducted for the effect of the selected treatment. The selected banana fruit were randomly divided into three groups of 150 fingers each for the following treatments.