## 1 Introduction  
Minerals, vitamins, and antioxidant materials in fruit crops are essential sources for human health care [1; 2]. The amount and longevity of these sources in stone fruits are highly dependent on the pre- and postharvest quality of the fruit e.g., [3; 4; 5]. Among stone fruit species, the post-harvest life of apricot (_Prunus armeniaca_) is short due to its climacteric nature [5]. Apricot fruit can keep its quality for 15-30 days after harvest if the fruit is stored at low temperature under cold storage (CS), e.g., [6; 7; 8; 9], and this quality can be kept for up to a further 5 days at 25 \({}^{\circ}\)C under shelf-life (SL) conditions [10]. However, longer storage at low temperatures can cause symptoms of chilling injury and/or fruit decay incidence in the apricot fruit e.g., [5; 7; 11]. Jasmonic acid (JA) and salicylic acid (SA) have crucial roles in the growth of plants and in the regulation to various plant stresses e.g., [12; 13], as well as in plant defense mechanisms, e.g., [14]. Methyl jasmonate (MeJA), as a natural plant growth regulator, e.g., [12; 13; 15; 16; 17], plays essential roles in many physiological mechanisms of plants, and it increases postharvest quality of horticultural crops including tropical fruits, such as avocado, papaya, grapefruit, mango, guava, pomegranates and loquat [18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24], and temperate fruits, such as apple, peach and cherry [25; 26; 27; 28]. These studies demonstrated that MeJA reduced incidences of fruit decay and chilling injury but increased the amount of phenolic and antioxidant contents as well as defense-related enzymes in fruits during CS. One apricot study evaluated the effect of MeJA on the sensory quality and physico-chemical parameters of fruit during storage [8], but treatment effects on chilling injury, fruit decay, antioxidant capacity, phenolic contents and enzyme activities were not reported. Salicylic acid (SA), together with its derivatives, is often applied to improve the quality of horticultural crops during storage [29; 30; 31; 32; 33; 34]. Salicylic acid was shown to improve fruit quality and to decrease chilling injury and quality loss in some fruit crops, such as on peach [29; 31; 35], banana [30], loquat [36] and apricot [8; 9; 37]. The three apricot studies showed that SA improved some quality features of apricot fruit after harvest [8; 9; 37], but changes in enzyme activities under CS and the degree of quality loss and the variation of antioxidant properties under SL conditions were not investigated. Only two studies carried out comparisons between MeJA and SA on evaluating quality features of cherry and apricot during storage [8; 26] but such a comparative study on chilling injury, fruit decay, antioxidant capacity, phenolic contents and enzyme activities was not prepared for apricot under CS or SL storage conditions. Several biological and physiological connections exist among the plant quality measurements, which can be expressed by presenting the correlation between the corresponding measurements such as between phenolic compounds, antioxidant properties and enzyme activity e.g., [38; 39; 40; 41], which help to understand the background of physiological processes in plant organs. However, no attempt has been made to determine the potential inter-correlations between chilling injury, fruit decay, the parameters of antioxidant capacity, phenolic contents and enzyme activities for SA and MeJA in various storage conditions for apricot fruit. The objective of this work was to evaluate and compare the effect of MeJA and SA on 10 fruit quality parameters of apricot under 1 \({}^{\circ}\)C CS (7, 14 and 21 days) and 25 \({}^{\circ}\)C SL (4 and 8 days after the 21 day CS) treatments.