2019 ASHS Annual Conference

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) production is constantly challenged by biotic and abiotic stresses that reduce yield and quality. The Texas A&M AgriLife Research tomato breeding program is developing conventional and specialty tomato cultivars for heat tolerance, fruit quality, and disease resistance. Field trials indicate that developed materials have high yield potential showing great stability across Texas regions. Furthermore, consumer flavor evaluation results showed preference for Texas A&M fruit compared to commercial checks. Up to now, the selection of elite lines in the breeding program has been done using conventional breeding approaches, in which large populations need to be screened for several breeding cycles. Although this approach has resulted in the release of high quality-high yielding cultivars, it is very time-consuming, delaying cultivar release. An alternative approach to improve breeding efficiency involves the use of modern molecular breeding techniques for population management including methods to obtain desired genetic heterogeneity in the end product cultivars. As an initial step into molecular breeding, a representative sample of 322 lines was characterized for yield and fruit quality parameters. Population was also sequenced using AgSeq approach. In total 10,326 variants were obtained using GATK. Genotypic data was used to calculate both genetic diversity partition and locus informativeness for ancestry assignment. Such genetic information’s corresponding with the phenotypic data will open the opportunity for selection of parents with desired genetic combinations using molecular approaches to expedite cultivar development.