Abstract
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is an important crop in the Solanaceae family. One of the key traits selected during domestication is fruit mass which is controlled by many quantitative trait loci. The fruit weight locus fw3.2 is one of the major loci responsible for fruit mass in tomato. Identification of the underlying gene will improve our understanding of the molecular mechanism of fruit development while also providing insights into genes that were selected during domestication. We fine mapped fw3.2 to a 51.4-kb interval corresponding to a region comprising seven candidate genes. Gene action showed that the allele from cultivated tomato was additive to dominant in giving rise to an enlarged fruit. Fruit shape analysis indicated that fw3.2 primarily played a role in controlling fruit weight, with a minor effect on fruit shape. Gene expression and nucleotide diversity were investigated and the likelihood of the genes control fruit mass is discussed.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the members of the Van der Knaap laboratory, in particular Jenny Moyseenko for assistance with greenhouse and field experiments. We thank John Elliot and Lee Duncan for field and greenhouse plant care, respectively. We also thank Dr. Sandy Clifton from Washington University Genome Center for an excellent job on the sequencing of the tomato BAC clone. The research was supported by National Science Foundation grants DBI 0227541 and IOS 0922661.
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Communicated by I. Paran.
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122_2012_1832_MOESM1_ESM.tif
Pedigrees of the materials used in this study. The accession 99T190-94 was an F2 plant from a cross between YS and LA1589. (TIFF 1436 kb)
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Zhang, N., Brewer, M.T. & van der Knaap, E. Fine mapping of fw3.2 controlling fruit weight in tomato. Theor Appl Genet 125, 273–284 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-012-1832-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-012-1832-8