Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2011
College/Unit
Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design
Department/Program/Center
Division of Plant and Soil Sciences
Abstract
Background
The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) plant is both an economically important food crop and an ideal dicot model to investigate various physiological phenomena not possible in Arabidopsis thaliana. Due to the great diversity of tomato cultivars used by the research community, it is often difficult to reliably compare phenotypes. The lack of tomato developmental mutants in a single genetic background prevents the stacking of mutations to facilitate analysis of double and multiple mutants, often required for elucidating developmental pathways.
Results
We took advantage of the small size and rapid life cycle of the tomato cultivar Micro-Tom (MT) to create near-isogenic lines (NILs) by introgressing a suite of hormonal and photomorphogenetic mutations (altered sensitivity or endogenous levels of auxin, ethylene, abscisic acid, gibberellin, brassinosteroid, and light response) into this genetic background. To demonstrate the usefulness of this collection, we compared developmental traits between the produced NILs. All expected mutant phenotypes were expressed in the NILs. We also created NILs harboring the wild type alleles for dwarf, self-pruning and uniform fruit, which are mutations characteristic of MT. This amplified both the applications of the mutant collection presented here and of MT as a genetic model system.
Conclusions
The community resource presented here is a useful toolkit for plant research, particularly for future studies in plant development, which will require the simultaneous observation of the effect of various hormones, signaling pathways and crosstalk.
Digital Commons Citation
Carvalho, Rogerio F.; Campos, Marcelo L.; Pino, Lilian E.; Crestana, Simone L.; Zzogon, Agustin; Lima, Joni E.; Benedito, Vanger A.; and Peres, Lazaro E P, "Convergence of developmental mutants into a single tomato model system: 'Micro-Tom' as an effective toolkit for plant development research" (2011). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 2754.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/2754
Source Citation
Carvalho, R.F., Campos, M.L., Pino, L.E. et al. Convergence of developmental mutants into a single tomato model system: 'Micro-Tom' as an effective toolkit for plant development research. Plant Methods 7, 18 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-4811-7-18
Comments
© 2011 Carvalho et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.