Argentinean tomato landraces, valuable sources for fruit quality traits.

ASIS R.; SANCE M. ; CARRARI F.; ASPRELLI P.D.; VALLE E.; PERALTA I.E.

Davis

Conferencia; 13th Annual Solanaceae Conference SolGenomics: From Advances to Applications; 2017

Local tomato landraces have been recently recovered from Andean areas of Cuyo and Nortwestern Argentina, and maintained in the Germplasm Bank of INTA La Consulta Experimental Station in Mendoza. These landraces have been selected by local farmers mainly for their environmental adaptation and fruit quality. Our goal was to establish associations among agronomic traits, fruit nutritional qualities and commercial characteristics of this Andean tomato collection. For this purpose, 32 tomato accessions and the wild species Solanum pimpinellifolium as contrasting control were evaluated. Tomato plants were grown at the Experimental Station INTA La Consulta and at the Institute of Horticulture (National University of Cuyo), using a randomized design with three replicates. For the morpho-agronomic characterization 19 traits were recorded. Mature red fruits were harvested, immediately freezed with liquid nitrogen, and maintained in ultra-freezer until analyses. Metabolite contents were evaluated by different methods (GC- and LC-MS and H-MNR). Volatile organic compounds were evaluated using headspace solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Antioxidant metabolites were measured by HPLC?DAD?MS/MS, and their biological activities were assessed by in vitro and in vivo methods. These approaches allowed to detect 175 different compounds and 101 volatile metabolites, among them 21 new compounds never informed in S. lycopersicum. As a complement of the biochemical analysis, fruit organoleptic characteristics were also evaluated. All data were integrated using multiple variable analyses. Agronomic and morphological traits, fruit nutritional and organoleptic characteristics are associated with a broad spectrum of metabolites in an Andean tomato germplasm collection. A different and original metabolic volatile composition was found in fruits of Andean tomatoes, in comparison with commercial cultivars. A similar pattern was also revealed by the antioxidant properties and organoleptic characteristics of traditional tomatoes. Natural environmental adaptation, domestication and independent artificial selection events would have generated different genetic constitutions, confirming that traditional agricultural habitats are important reservoirs of genetic diversity. These results revealed a promising breeding perspective, since the incorporation of Andean tomato accessions could reinforce genetic variability, as a source of valuable new compounds to improve fruit quality and incorporate interesting bioactive molecules in cultivated tomatoes.