Hybrid Tomato Breeding

Abstract

Summary Tomato is one of the most popular vegetable crops grown across the world. Its genetics is much studied among vegetable crops, resulted in the reorganization of its commercial exploitation of hybrid vigor since last hundred years. Tomato has tremendous potential of heterosis for earliness, total yield, resistance attributes and uniformity. Hybrid tomato varieties will continue to predominate high input agricultural systems and may expand under some lower input systems where benefits can be demonstrated. Increasing demand for hybrid seeds can stress commercial hybrid seed production abilities. At present most of the hybrid seeds of tomato is being produced by hand emasculation and hand pollination. The advances in genetic emasculation methods can prove very useful for making the hybrid seed production profitable and ensure the supply of hybrid seed at cheaper rates to the growers.