GENOMICS APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING RIPENING CONTROL AND FRUIT QUALITY IN TOMATO

The maturation and ripening of fleshy fruits contributes a major component of human diets, nutrition and agricultural activity. While ripening brings about highly desirable changes in fruit character and chemistry in terms of flavor, appearance, texture and nutrition, the advanced stages of ripening lead to sub-optimal fruit quality and eventually post-harvest loss. Fruit biologists have studied numerous fruiting species with the intent of identifying strategies and technologies toward improving desirable ripening attributes while minimizing those with negative consequences. Tomato has emerged as a model for fleshy fruit ripening, in part due to its ease of use as a model system resulting from facilitating attributes including simple genetics, numerous characterized mutants, cross-fertile wild germplasm to promote genetic studies and routine transformation technology. In the last decade, the tomato system has been further complemented with molecular and genomic tools including dense genetic maps, large EST collections and the recently initiated genome sequencing effort. The isolation of genes corresponding to several previously described tomato ripening mutations has led to considerable advancement of a genetic regulatory model of fruit ripening while emerging genomics technologies promise exceptional opportunities for continued advancement of this field.