Amazonian Journal of Plant Research ©2017 Universidade Federal do Pará This paper is available online free of all access charges – Faculdade de Engenharia Agronômica http://www.ajpr.online - Amaz. Jour. of Plant Resear. 3(1):290-297. 2019 Edmarcos X. dos Santos 290 E-mail: edmarcosxavier@gmail.com Original Paper Postharvest technologies in the ripening of ‘Maçã’ bananas stored in ambient condition Edmarcos X. dos Santos 1 , Paula Jaqueline A. Santana 1 , Alana Camila C. Diniz 1 , Alex G. Sanches 2 and Carlos Alberto M. Cordeiro 3 1 Federal University of Pará, Altamira - PA, Brazil 2 Department of Horticulture (Plant production), Paulista State University, Faculty of Agrarian and Veterinary Sciences, Jaboticabal - SP, Brazil 3 Federal University of Pará, Bragança - PA, Brazil Received: 08 September, 2018. Accepted: 11 March, 2019 First published on the web August, 2019 Doi: 10.26545/ajpr.2019.b00036x Abstract The banana is a climacteric fruit with a limited shelf life in the environment and sensitive to storage under refrigeration, necessitating strategies to improve its post harvest conservation. In this sense, the objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of post harvest technologies on the quality and the prolongation of the useful life of ‘Maçã’ bananas during storage in ambient temperature condition (25 ºC). The fruits were obtained in physiological maturity in the green color and immersed in the following solutions: distilled water (control), cassava starch, maize starch and 3% calcium chloride for three minutes in addition to the sachets containing 3g KMnO4 for one period of 12 days in ambient condition. The evaluations took place every three days in terms of loss of fresh weight, firmness of peel, starch content, soluble solids, titratable acidity, pH, SS/AT ratio and incidence of rot. The postharvest treatments extended the shelf life of the fruits for 12 days in relation to the nine days of the control treatment. Among the evaluated technologies, the use of sachets of KMnO4 delayed ripening by observing fruits with higher green retention of the peel and pulp firmness, as well as lower fresh mass loss, starch degradation, soluble solids synthesis, ratio SS/AT and incidence of rot during the storage period. Thus, the ethylene absorber based on KMnO4 represents a viable alternative for the preservation of the quality of 'Maçã' bananas during commercialization at room temperature. Key-words: Musa sp., Ethylene Absorber, Calcium Chloride, Edible Coatings, Fruit Quality Introduction Banana (Musa sp) is a tropical fruit widely consumed in the world and Brazil stands out in this scenario as the fourth largest producer in the world, with 6.8 million tons produced in 2018 (Agrianual, 2019). However, despite its large production and consumption, the banana has a high index of post- harvest losses, which limits its commercialization in the form "in natura" (Sousa et al., 2018). Characterized as a climacteric fruit the banana presents a fast and irreversible maturation that is accompanied by significant changes in the physical and chemical attributes (Mohapatra et al., 2010; Alkarkhi et al., 2011) limiting the shelf life of 6 to 8 days at room temperature (Huang et al., 2014), also does not tolerate temperatures below 13 °C precluding refrigerated storage due to the occurrence of cold or chilling injury (Nguyen et al., 2003; Kumari et al., 2017). In this sense, the search for strategies to improve the post-harvest conservation of bananas such as the use of edible coatings based on starch, calcium chloride and sachets of ethylene (KMnO4) are alternatives to increase the useful life of the fruit.