Regulating Tomato quality through Expression

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Zhangjun Fei, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Alisdair Fernie, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. James Giovannoni, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Harry Klee; Professorin Dr. Cathie Martin; Professor Dr. Björn Usadel
• Subject Area: Plant Physiology
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 263748294

The twin objectives of RegulaTomE are to determine the importance of transcriptional regulation of the metabolic pathways defining quality traits in tomato and to identify any such transcriptional regulators at the molecular level. The selected quality traits will be those determining antioxidant capacity which impacts shelf life and nutritional value of tomatoes as well as those determining fruit flavour and over-ripening which influence shelf-life and organoleptic properties significantly. RegulaTomE will use the natural variation available in introgression lines (ILs) resulting from wild species crosses to tomato to assess the importance of transcriptional regulation and to identify regulatory genes. To identify genes regulating metabolic pathways using the Solanum lycopersicoides ILs, which are based on a wide species comparison, to capture as much variation as possible for application to tomato improvement, considerable resources need to be developed, including genome and transcriptome sequences for S. lycopersicoides and metabolite and transcriptome profiling of the fruit of all of the ILs. These will provide invaluable tools and resources for the community to exploit further the untapped natural variation in S.lycopersicoides. The co-ordinated effort on RegulaTomE will lead to regulatory gene identification, which will be an important advance in terms of fundamental understanding, and also provide new tools for metabolic engineering of fruit quality. More immediately it is anticipated that the natural variation in fruit quality revealed by the S.lycopersicoides ILs could be applied rapidly to tomato improvement either directly through introgression into cultivated varieties or indirectly through the identification of alleles making positive contributions to quality traits in other close relatives of tomato.The cooperation of scientists from four major European organisations and two US Universities producing world-leading research on plants and agricultural innovation will allow the development of tools and resources on a scale unavailable at a national level. The outputs of RegulaTomE will provide a framework of understanding as well as tools, in the form of genes and molecular markers, to support development of longer shelf-life, more nutritious and more flavorsome fleshy fruits in other horticultural crops. The effectiveness of these resources and the significance of the knowledge acquired on RegulaTomE will ensure that the project will contribute directly to underpinning food security and more sustainable fruit cultivation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel, United Kingdom, USA
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Takayuki Tohge
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Daniel Zamir