Tomato Analyzer: A Useful Software Application to Collect Accurate and Detailed Morphological and Colorimetric Data from Two-dimensional Objects

Abstract

Measuring fruit morphology and color traits of vegetable and fruit crops in an objective and reproducible way is important for detailed phenotypic analyses of these traits. Tomato Analyzer (TA) is a software program that measures 37 attributes related to two-dimensional shape in a semi-automatic and reproducible manner1,2. Many of these attributes, such as angles at the distal and proximal ends of the fruit and areas of indentation, are difficult to quantify manually. The attributes are organized in ten categories within the software: Basic Measurement, Fruit Shape Index, Blockiness, Homogeneity, Proximal Fruit End Shape, Distal Fruit End Shape, Asymmetry, Internal Eccentricity, Latitudinal Section and Morphometrics. The last category requires neither prior knowledge nor predetermined notions of the shape attributes, so morphometric analysis offers an unbiased option that may be better adapted to high-throughput analyses than attribute analysis. TA also offers the Color Test application that was designed to collect color measurements from scanned images and allow scanning devices to be calibrated using color standards3. TA provides several options to export and analyze shape attribute, morphometric, and color data. The data may be exported to an excel file in batch mode (more than 100 images at one time) or exported as individual images. The user can choose between output that displays the average for each attribute for the objects in each image (including standard deviation), or an output that displays the attribute values for each object on the image. TA has been a valuable and effective tool for indentifying and confirming tomato fruit shape Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL), as well as performing in-depth analyses of the effect of key fruit shape genes on plant morphology. Also, TA can be used to objectively classify fruit into various shape categories. Lastly, fruit shape and color traits in other plant species as well as other plant organs such as leaves and seeds can be evaluated with TA.