| Category | Agriculture, Fruit |
| Keywords | Passion fruit, Passiflora edulis, plant breeding, warm temperature flower abscission out-of-season fruit. |
| Current development stage | General list: TRL5 Technology validated in relevant environment |
Background
Most passion fruit cultivars grown under subtropical climates bear fruit twice a year, in the summer and the winter. Peel color is either purple or yellow with yellow fruit being larger and very sour.
Our Innovation
We developed an exotic flavored passionfruit cultivar, with a yellowish pink color peel and beautiful purple spots. This passionfruit cultivar, named ‘GILIS’ (line ‘280-15’), is 2x larger than the leading Israeli commercial varieties and has a very juicy and aromatic sweet-sour taste. GILIS flowers and sets fruit also during the warm summer, creating a bearing period which begins in July and end in April – a total of 9 months!
- GILIS is perfectly round and its appearance is appealing like that of a pink lady apple.
- The peel’s relative thickness significantly increases shelf-life by preventing post-harvest fruit damage.
- GILIS has a longer season than the leading commercial varieties.
- GILIS has very vigorous growth.
Physical Attributes of the fruit:
GILIS has a yellowish-pink color peel with purple spots that is very attractive to consumers. GILIS are 2x larger than Passion Dream, the leading Israeli commercial variety.
Opportunity
GILIS’ extraordinary taste, size, appearance and potential yield has attracted much attention from expert growers. Gillis is intended to be sold as fresh fruit but can also be used in the production of juices. GILIS is protected by PBR (Plant Breeders Rights) in Israel.
We are looking for growers and distributors in Israel as well as partners abroad for growing, marketing and selling GILIs.
Please see other specialty passion fruit cultivars such as Dena (line 428), Oris (line 280-4) and Yukis (line 280-7).
