Cucumis Melo L. Case Study

Cucumis melo Linn. was first described by Linne in 1753. It belong to the family Cucurbitaceae which consists of 825 species in 118 genera (Milind and Kulwant, 2011). The birth of Cucumis melo L. has been uncertain. However, novel review has testified its origin from East and South Africa. Different cultivated varieties and different forms of fruits have emerged universally in tropical and sub-tropical regions. Cucumis melo L. has a wide geographic distribution. Native countries include South Africa, Iran, India, China, Australia and Philippine. Exotic range consist many countries from USA, Africa, Pacific and Asia including Sri Lanka (Milind and Kulwant, 2011).
In Sri Lanka, Cucumis melo L. grow well in waste ground in the low-lying country.
composed of several macronutrients and micronutrients that attributes to its nutritional value. Based on variety and the environmental factors that affect the growth, variations in compositions and nutritional value are seen in melon that grown in different countries. In a study from Bulgaria, seeds of three varieties of melon (Cucumis melo L.) were analyzed by Petkova and Anova (2015) for their chemical and lipid compositions. The results showed that chemical composition consisted of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, crude fibers, soluble sugars and minerals. The lipid composition included fatty acids (linoleic and oleic acid), phospholipids (phosphatidylinositol, phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine), free and esterified sterols (β-sitosterol) and tocopherols (γ-tocopherol). Gas chromatography (GC) was used to determine the fatty acid composition of the triacylglycerol, sterol esters and phospholipids where it showed that 80% of the triglyceride composition was trilinolein (31.3–32.2%), oleo dilinolein (31.0–34.0%) and palmitoyl dilinolein (14.9–22.3%). Palmitic acid and oleic acids were the major fatty acids of the
In a study done in Iran (Gholampour-Azizi et al., 2015) gas chromatography mass-spectroscopy (GC-MS) was used to analyze phytoconstituents of aqueous, ethanolic and methanolic extracts of mature and immature C.melo fruit. The results exhibited that hexadecanoic acid compounds were found in all the extracts with 9, 12-octadecadienoicacid and hexadeconoic acid in mature fruit methanolic extract. Hexadeconoic acid, 9, 12-octadecadienoic acid and n-hexadecanoic acid were found in immature ethanolic extract. In a study conducted by Mallek-Ayadi, Bahloul, and Kechaou, (2017), phytochemical composition of Cucumis melo L. peels was analyzed. High performance liquid chromatography was performed for standardization. Peels consisted of carbohydrates, ash, phenols, flavonoids and dietary fibers. Main phenolic classes were flavones and hydroxybenzoic acid where 3-hydroxybenzoic acid was the major phenolic compound followed by apigenin-7-glycoside. Another study on preliminary phytochemical screening of methanolic seeds extract of Cucumis melo var. agrestis grown in India showed the presence of alkaloids and triterpenoids in greater amounts, carbohydrates, proteins and phytosterols in minor amounts and the absence of anthraquinone and tannins (Arora et al.,