The Inheritance of Bacterial Soft Rot Tolerance through Stem Scar Water Infiltration in Tomato

Abstract

When tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) fruit come in contact with water at the packing house dump tanks, they can infiltrate water through the stem scar. If the water is infested with Erwinia carotovora, the fruit can infiltrate the bacteria, which will later develop into bacterial soft rot. To determine the inheritance of low water infiltration and thus tolerance to soft rot, a complete diallel was produced using six parents that infiltrate different amounts of water. The parents and hybrids were grown in a completely randomized block design with three blocks and 10 plants per block. The amount of water infiltrated by the fruit was measured by the change in weight after the fruit were immersed in water in a pressure cooker for 2 min. Both general combining ability (GCA) and specific combining ability (SCA) were significant, with GCA having a higher significance than SCA. There appeared to be a cytoplasmic effect on water uptake, where less water was taken up when the low-uptake parent was used as a female. When orthogonal contrasts were performed on reciprocal hybrids from parents that were significantly different, 33% of them were significantly different.