Emerging Model Organisms

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum): A Model Fruit-Bearing Crop

Department of Plant Biology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA

¹ Corresponding author (nrsinha{at}ucdavis.edu)

INTRODUCTION

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is one of the most important vegetable plants in the world. It originated in western South America, and domestication is thought to have occurred in Central America. Because of its importance as food, tomato has been bred to improve productivity, fruit quality, and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Tomato has been widely used not only as food, but also as research material. The tomato plant has many interesting features such as fleshy fruit, a sympodial shoot, and compound leaves, which other model plants (e.g., rice and Arabidopsis) do not have. Most of these traits are agronomically important and cannot be studied using other model plant systems. There are 13 recognized wild tomato species that display a great variety of phenotypes and can be crossed with the cultivated tomato. These wild tomatoes are important for breeding, as sources of desirable traits, and for evolutionary studies. Current progress on the tomato genome sequencing project has generated useful information to help in the study of tomato. In addition, the tomato belongs to the extremely large family Solanaceae and is closely related to many commercially important plants such as potato, eggplant, peppers, tobacco, and petunias. Knowledge obtained from studies conducted on tomato can be easily applied to these plants, which makes tomato important research material. Because of these facts, tomato serves as a model organism for the family Solanaceae and, specifically, for fleshy-fruited plants.