Abstract
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is an important vegetable crop worldwide. Often times, its production is hindered by fungal diseases. Important fungal diseases limiting tomato production are late blight, caused by Phytophthora infestans, early blight, caused by Alternaria solanii, and septoria leaf spot, caused by Septoria lycopersici, fusarium wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporium fsp. oxysporium, and verticilium wilt caused by Verticilium dahlea. The Phytophthora infestans is the same fungus that caused the devastating loss of potato in Europe in 1845. A similar magnitude of crop loss in tomato has not occurred but Phytophthora infestans has caused the complete loss of tomato crops around the world on a small scale. Several attempts have been made through conventional breeding and the molecular biological approaches to understand the biology of host-pathogen interaction so that the disease can be managed and crop loss prevented. In this review, we present a comprehensive analysis of information produced by molecular genetic and genomic experiments on host-pathogen interactions of late blight, early blight, septoria leaf spot, verticilim wilt and fusarium wilt in tomato. Furthermore, approaches adopted to manage these diseases in tomato including genetic transformation are presented. Attempts made to link molecular markers with putative genes and their use in crop improvement are discussed.
Highlights
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum, formerly, Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) is the second most important vegetable crop after potato in the world
Despite the progress made in QTL mapping and marker development for tomato fungal disease resistance described in the previous section, it has been difficult to elucidate the genetic basis of tomato resistance to microbial pathogens, mainly due to the low level of genetic polymorphism within S. lycopersicum [29]
Molecular markers and QTL analysis work performed so far has been useful for locating the resistance gene(s) on the genome of tomato and to carry out marker-assisted selection for some of the fungal diseases
Summary
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum, formerly, Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) is the second most important vegetable crop after potato in the world. In order to identify and estimate the effect of genes conditioning resistance to EB, a QTL mapping study was performed in F2 and F3 populations derived from a cross between S. lycopersicum cv.
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