Prediction of suitable regions of wild tomato provides insights on domesticated tomato cultivation in China

Abstract

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges to the world at present. Tomato is also suffered from devastating yield loss due to climate change. The domesticated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is presumed to be originated from the wild tomato (S. pimpinellifolium). In this study, we compared the climate data of S. pimpinellifollium with the domesticated tomato, predicted the suitable regions of S. pimpinellifollium in China using MaxEnt model and assessed their tolerance to drought stress. We found that the predicted suitable regions of wild tomato are highly consistent with the current cultivated regions of domesticated tomato, suggesting that the habitat demand of domesticated tomato descended largely from its ancestor, hence the habitat information of wild tomato could provide a reference for tomato cultivation. We further predicted suitable regions of wild tomato in the future in China. Finally, we found that while average drought tolerance between wild and domesticated tomato accessions shows no difference, tolerance levels among wild tomato accessions exhibit higher variation, which could be used for future breeding to improve drought resistance. To summarize, our study shows that suitable regions of wild tomato provide insights into domesticated tomato cultivation in China.