Inheritance of shelf life and other quality traits of tomato fruit estimated from F1’s, F2’s and backcross generations derived from standard cultivar, nor homozygote and wild cherry tomato

Abstract

A tomato cultivar with high quality fruit and a long shelf life is a main goal in tomato breeding and it would be achieved using wild germplasm. The objective of this work was to explore the inheritance for fruit quality traits, especially fruit shelf life, in three tomato crosses using a standard Argentinean cultivar (Ca, cv ‘Caimanta’), a ripening mutant (nor, homozygous for the nor gene) of Solanum lycopersicum, and a wild cherry type (Ce, LA1385 of S. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme). The wild parent had a shorter fruit shelf life than the mutant genotype but higher than Ca. When the Ce genotype was analyzed in hybrid combination, the F1 (Ca×Ce) was similar to the wild genotype for shelf life whereas the F1 (nor × Ce) had a longer shelf life. Both F1 crosses and backcrosses to the cherry type genotype had significantly lower fruit weight than the cultivated genotypes but higher than the cherry type parent. In the F2 analysis, it was found that the inheritance underlying quality traits is complex since non allelic interactions were detected. A significant additive genetic variance was found for fruit shelf life as well as for other fruit quality traits in each cross. The genetic parameters analyzed by mean values and variances in parental, F1 and F2 and backcross generations indicated that the cross between the normal ripening cultivar and LA1385 of S. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme offers the best possibility to obtain long shelf life tomato genotypes with good fruit quality.