Abstract
Tomato is one of the most important vegetables cultivated in Vietnam. Besides its regular consumption as a vegetable, a new demand for using tomato as a decorative plant on special occasions was identified in recent years. This study aimed to characterize new tomato accessions on their desirable morphological traits to select potential materials for further breeding programs of ornamental tomato varieties in Vietnam. Twenty-four heirloom tomato genotypes were evaluated on 19 morphological traits. Based on the describing system for tomato developed by the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI, 1996), significant variation was assessed in both qualitative and quantitative traits related to fruit morphology. The results of principle component analysis indicated that three main principle components explained over 60% of the total phenotypic variation. The five traits of fruit size, fruit shoulder shape, fruit cross-sectional shape, number of locules, and shape of the pistil scar were recommended as important traits for clustering tomato genotypes in this study. In addition, the 24 genotypes were classified at the coefficient of 0.39 into six different clusters. Finally, six interesting accessions, AU66, AU67, AU68, AU73, AU79, and AU83 (with strange fruit colors and shapes), were selected as potential materials for further breeding programs of ornamental tomato in Vietnam.
Highlights
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) originated in the Andean region of South America, was domesticated in Mexico, spread to Europe in the early 16th century, and later to the whole world (Blanca et al, 2012)
The results of principle component analysis indicated that three main principle components explained over 60% of the total phenotypic variation
The phenotypes of the greenmature fruit were diverse with 3 white shoulder genotypes (12%) and 3 slight green shoulder genotypes (12%), while the majority had exposed shoulders with green (7 genotypes) or dark green (11 genotypes) colors, which accounted for 29.2% and 45.8%, respectively (Table 3 and Figure 1b)
Summary
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) originated in the Andean region of South America, was domesticated in Mexico, spread to Europe in the early 16th century, and later to the whole world (Blanca et al, 2012). In 2017, tomato was the most consumed vegetable worldwide with over 177 million tons produced for both fresh and processing markets (Omondi, 2017). In Vietnam, tomato has been cultivated for over 100 years and has become one of the highest valued economic vegetables for both the domestic market and exporting (Ha, 2015). Among many different breeding programs, diversifying the germplasm is always defined as one of the most important steps. The genetic diversity data of many tomato germplasms have been reported and used for different breeding purposes such as developing elite inbred lines (Wang et al, 2016; Kaur et al, 2019), predicting potential heterosis between two parents in hybrid tomato breeding (Jin et al, 2019), and identifying valuable materials for specific breeding targets. Some breeding targets of greatest concern include: increasing fruit yield components (Reddy et al, 2013; Ziaf et al, 2016), improving fruit quality (Panthee et al, 2013; Singh et al, 2018), and accelerating adaptability to both biotic and abiotic stresses (Panthee & Chen, 2010; Danso et al, 2011; Hoagland et al, 2015; Hanson et al, 2016)
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