Metabolic analyses of interspecific tomato recombinant inbred lines for fruit quality improvement

Abstract

Elucidating the determinants of tomato nutritional value and fruit quality to introduce improved varieties on the international market represents a major challenge for crop biotechnology. Different strategies can be undertaken to exploit the natural variability of Solanum to re-incorporate lost allelic diversity into commercial varieties. One of them is the characterization of selected germplasm for breeding programs. To achieve this goal, 18 RILs (S. lycopersicum × S. pimpinellifolium) were comprehensively phenotyped for fruit polar metabolites and quality associated traits. Metabolites were quantified by GC–MS and 1H NMR. Integrative analyses by neuronal clustering and network construction revealed that fruit properties are strongly associated with the metabolites aspartate, serine, glutamate and 2-oxoglutarate. Shelf life and firmness appeared to be linked to malate content. By a comparative analysis of the whole data set, ten RILs presented higher number of traits with positive effect than the S. lycopersicum × S. pimpinellifolium hybrid. Thus, these lines can be proposed as promising candidates for breeding programs aimed to improve fruit quality.