Variability and selection of tomato Sletr1-2 mutants backcross population to improve yield and fruit quality

Abstract

Enhancing fruit quality and yield is the goal of creating superior tomato varieties. One area of concern for breeders is fruit shelf life. To produce better offspring, hybridization attempts to combine the traits of two parents, but the results can be unpredictable. Backcrossing can create stable offspring with desired traits and eliminate undesirable characteristics from the parent plants. This study aimed to assess the diversity among advanced backcross strains and to obtain backcross genotypes carrying mutant alleles that have a high level of similarity with the superior parental lines. The study was carried out from April to September 2019 at the Indonesian Vegetable Research Institute’s screen house. In this experiment, two populations of backcrossing comprised of commercial parents of ‘Intan’ and ‘Mutiara’ varieties as well as backcross genotypes including MBC3F1 32, MBC3F1 32.2, MBC3F1 32.3, MBC3F1 37.2, MBC3F1 45.3, MBC3F1 37.1, IBC3F1 34.2, IBC3F1 37.2, and IBC3F1 34 were utilized. A variance analysis was used to determine genotype diversity. The genetic similarity between parents and offspring was determined using cluster analysis, and a t-test was used to compare mean performance values. According to the results, the BC3F1 populations of ‘Intan’, and ‘Mutiara’ exhibited a high degree of phenotypic variability. Cluster analysis and a t-test revealed that the IBC3F1.37.2 and IBC3F1.45.3 genotypes resembled ‘Intan’, furthermore MBC3F1.34 and MBC3F1.34.2 had strikingly similar characteristics to ‘Mutiara’. Therefore, several individual plants carrying the Sletr1-2 mutant allele in these four genotypes can further assemble longer tomato fruit shelf life and high-yielding varieties.