Tomato Bioresources Based on '˜Micro-Tom' for Facilitation of Fruits Biology

Tomato is an economically important crop on worldwide food production. Tomato is useful for studies of fleshy fruits and experimental genomic studies of the Solanaceae family including potato, eggplant, pepper, petunia and tobacco. Furthermore, tomato fruits have many functional metabolites including carotenoids, vitamin A and C and functional amino acid such as GABA. For facilitation of breeding and functional genomics research of tomato, we have started the tomato bioresource program since 2007 within the framework of the National BioResource Project (NBRP) in Japan (NBRP tomato; http://tomato.nbrp.jp/). The major activities by the NBRP-tomato is to collect, preserve and provide tomato bioresources including major experimental lines, mutant lines, transgenic lines and cDNA collections in the genetic background of Micro-Tom, a small and rapid growth variety of tomato.

More than 15,000 mutant lines have been produced by ethylmethanesulfonate (EMS) treatment and gamma-ray irradiation, and mutants with distinct phenotypes have been isolated. All of the visible phenotyping data and other associated data in individual mutants were registered in the database ‘TOMATOMA’ (http://tomatoma.nbrp.jp/). To enhance the quality of the mutant resources, metabolic components including amino acid composition, carotenoid contents and Brix values in mutant fruits were measured and these data are now open through TOMATOMA since Jun. 2015. These mutants with phenotypic and the metabolite information will help further accelerate tomato fruit 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/).