Joint NSF/ERA-CAPS: RegulaTomE - Regulating Tomato Quality through Expression

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PI: Harry J. Klee (University of Florida-Gainesville) CoPIs: James J. Giovannoni and Zhangjun Fei (USDA-ARS/ Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research)ERA-CAPS Collaborators: Cathie Martin (John Innes Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom), Alisdair Fernie (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology, Golm, Germany), Bjoern Usadel (Aachen University, Aachen, Germany), and Dani Zamir (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel) Producers are under pressure to produce more, cheaper food with reduced inputs and impact on the environment. Consumers need and want healthier, better tasting foods than those produced by today's typical production systems focused on quantity rather than quality. This project focuses on tomato, the most economically important fruit/vegetable crop worldwide. The overall goal of this project is to elucidate the genetic mechanisms controlling plant responses to environmental stresses such as drought and to understand how the environment influences the endogenous chemistry of flavor and nutritional qualities in tomato. This research will deliver mechanistic knowledge as well as tangible tools for agronomic and quality improvement of tomato and other crops. Specifically, naturally occurring versions of genes permitting more robust responses to abiotic stress and positively impacting flavor and nutritional quality will be identified and disseminated to public and private breeders so as to inform their selection processes. The effectiveness of these resources and the significance of the knowledge acquired will ensure that the project contributes directly to food security and sustainable fruit cultivation through use of currently untapped genetic information residing in underutilized wild tomato varieties. With regard to outreach and training, the project will provide unique cross-training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, the project will provide summer research internships in genomics and bioinformatics for undergraduate students from Fort Valley State, California State University, Fresno and California State University, Sacramento, all minority serving institutions. The twin objectives of this project are to determine the importance of transcriptional regulation of the metabolic pathways defining quality traits in tomato and to identify such transcriptional regulators at the molecular level. The selected quality traits include those determining antioxidant capacity that impacts shelf life and nutritional value as well as those determining fruit flavor. Loci contributing to abiotic stress tolerance will also be identified with the goal of developing more nutritious and sustainable crops. Natural variation available in introgression lines (ILs) resulting from wild species crosses to tomato will be used to assess the importance of transcriptional regulation, identify regulatory genes and assess epigenetic variation. To accomplish these ends, resources that include a genome reference sequence for S. lycopersicoides and metabolite, DNA methylation and transcriptome profiles of IL fruit will be developed and made freely available. Deliverables include regulatory gene identification and new tools for metabolic engineering of fruit quality. This collaborative US-EU project will allow development of tools and resources on a scale unavailable at a national level. All data produced will be freely and continuously shared within the consortium. Specifically, sequence based datasets will be accessible through a consortium database as well as through publicly available data repositories including GenBank, European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and the SOL Genomics Network (SGN).