Tomato Bioresources in Japan: Collection of ‘Micro-Tom’ Mutants with Major Fruit Metabolite Profiles

Tomato is an excellent model plant for studies of fleshy fruits and experimental genomic studies of the Solanaceae family including potato, eggplant, pepper, petunia and tobacco. Tomato fruits contain many functional metabolites, such as lycopene, vitamin A and C and GABA. To facilitate breeding and functional genomics research of tomato, we launched on the tomato bioresource program in 2007 within the framework of the National BioResource Project (NBRP) in Japan (NBRP tomato; http://tomato.nbrp.jp/). The major purpose of the NBRP-tomato is to collect, preserve and provide tomato bioresources including major experimental lines, mutant lines, transgenic lines and cDNA collections. We have chosen a cultivar Micro-Tom as a model system that has advantages as a model plant due to its small plant size, a short life cycle and the availability of functional genomics tools. As mutant resources in NBRP tomato, we have generated >13,000 mutant lines by ethylmethanesulfonate (EMS) treatment and gamma-ray irradiation. All of the visible phenotyping data and other associated data were registered with the database ‘TOMATOMA’ (http://tomatoma.nbrp.jp/). For enhancement of the quality of the mutant resources, we are profiling metabolic components of tomato fruits including amino acid composition, carotenoid contents and Brix values, and the data was available through TOMATOMA from Jun. 2015. The metabolite information will support further acceleration of tomato fruits researches. In addition to the mutant resources, as DNA resources, the sequence information of Micro-Tom full-length cDNA and EST is available from database ‘KaFTom (http://www.pgb.kazusa.or.jp/kaftom/) and EST database ‘MiBASE’ (http://www.pgb.kazusa.or.jp/mibase/), respectively. Information on genome structural annotations between Micro-Tom and Heinz 1706 is accessible through the genome browser in ‘TOMATOMICS’ (http://bioinf.mind.meiji.ac.jp/tomatomics/). Our bioresources of Micro-Tom will support further acceleration of tomato researches.