Agronomic and metabolic fruit traits characterization of five tomato cultivars and their performance in hybrid condition

PEREIRA DA COSTA, JAVIER H; BUENO, RODRIGO ALEJANDRO; ZANOR, MARIA INES; FORTUNY, AGUSTINA; RODRÍGUEZ, GUSTAVO RUBÉN

Congreso; International Congress of Genetics 2018; 2018

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is one of the most important vegetables worldwide based on its cultivated area, level of production and consumption, either fresh or processed. The aim of this work was to characterize five tomato genotypes and their hybrids, following a diallel design, for agronomic fruit traits and metabolite levels. The parental genotypes were two cultivars from USA: Red Purple and Zebra Green, and three Argentinean cultivars: Querubín FCA, Gema FCA and ToUNR 17. We used Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to visualize the variation of genotypes and to infer heterosis, possible reciprocal, maternal or paternal effects. When the parental lines? PCA was analysed by themselves, we can see that genotypes were mostly separated based on asparagine, isoleucine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, colour index, pH and α-ketoglutarate. When all genotypes were included into the analysis, the separation was mainly explained by fruit agronomic traits, such as diameter, shape, height, weight but also the metabolite contents of GABA, isoleucine and methanol contributed to differentiate them. Additionally, the hybrids showing higher reciprocal effects were Gema FCA x Red Purple, and Gema FCA x ToUNR 17, whereas the combination between Gema FCA and Zebra Green showed the highest paternal effect. The hybrids showed higher percentage of heterosis for metabolite levels than for agronomic traits. We also determined correlation coefficient among traits. Interestingly, the agronomic trait locule number was highly associated to galactose. Furthermore, fumarate was the metabolite with the highest number of associations to agronomic traits.