Author(s):

P Pradeep Kumar, Brati Acharya, Subhramalya Dutta, Shubhrajyoti Saha, Jayanta Choudhury and Pranab Hazra

Abstract: Tomato domestication experienced a severe genetic bottleneck as the crop was carried from the Andes to Central America and from there to Europe. Selection of a horticultural crop like tomato is usually done on a single plant basis and with small numbers of selected plants. Domestication has triggered a wide range of morphological and physiological traits that distinguished domesticated crops from their wild ancestors. These characteristics are collectively referred to as the domestication syndrome (Frary and Doganlar, 2003). Studies on the domestication syndrome and domestication process have revealed that numerous traits that distinguished crop plants from their wild relatives which include a more compact growth habit, increased earliness, reduction / loss of seed dispersal and dormancy, gigantism and increased morphological diversity. These characters are often controlled genetically by a relatively small number of loci with effects of unequal magnitude (Frary and Doganlar, 2003). In tomato, domestication syndrome traits have been studied for growth habit (self-pruning, plant height and earliness) and fruit traits (set, size, shape, colour and morphology) and the qualitative genes and quantitative trait loci (QTLs) underlying these syndrome characteristics have been identified (Grandillo and Tanksley, 1996; Doganlar et al., 2000; Frary and Doganlar, 2003; Tanksley, 2004). In the present investigation, mean of the 25 plant, fruit, fruit quality, physiological and seed characters of the 4 wild relatives of tomato viz Solanum pimpinellifolium, Solanum chilense (EC 513698), Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiformae (EC 514013) and Solanum peruvianum (EC251790) were compared with that of the 5 cultivated tomato genotypes viz Berika, BCT-115dg, Alisa Craig Aft, BCT-59 (IC 0585694) and BCT 82 (IC 0585697) to test the significance of difference between the two mean by paired ‘t’ test to document the array of characters that distinguished cultivated species from their wild relatives.

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