RESEARCH-PGR: Regulation of tomato fruit flavor and nutrition quality

番茄是全世界种植的最有价值的水果或蔬菜。这个项目使用遗传学和生物化学来了解番茄是如何合成风味和营养化学物质的。风味和营养是现代社会农作物改良的重要目标。饮食中不健康的转变可以通过生产更美味、更有吸引力和更有营养的食物来应对。在全球范围内，生物强化粮食作物可以解决影响数百万最贫穷人口的微量营养素营养不良问题。味道更好、更有营养、货架期更长的粮食作物可能会对世界粮食生产和可持续性产生深远影响。如果水果和蔬菜味道更好，人们会吃更多。番茄果实成熟涉及1000多个基因的同时表达。参与成熟的不同方面的许多代谢途径是如何被调节的在很大程度上是未知的。该项目使用系统方法来确定每条途径的调节者，定义了整个过程中基因控制的监管等级。所获得的知识反过来将促进特定特征的改进，如风味和维生素含量。除了对下一代科学家进行跨学科培训外，公民科学项目还将利用公众对西红柿的浓厚兴趣。个人将参加一个业余植物育种计划，以确定家庭花园的新品种。他们将收集北美各地试验线相对于标准检查品种Better Boy的性能数据。公民的投入将是品种释放的基础。之前的努力已经建立了番茄果实作为理解复杂、多基因性状的遗传控制的范例。统一的项目目标是确定重要的水果成熟、营养和风味途径基因的调控基因，以促进对水果成熟的更全面了解，并开发作物改良工具。该项目采用系统的方法，涉及遗传学、生物化学、分子生物学、生理学、基因组学、信息学和代谢组学，以确定水果品质相关过程和途径调控的重要组成部分，并确定已识别的基因的功能特征。将开发支持更多番茄的公共基因组学资源和用于改良更多果树的转化研究。具体的研究目标集中在开发数据集，阐明调控相互作用，分析结果数据，目的是对高优先级调控基因的子集进行功能表征，并通过现有数据库(http://ted.bti.cornell.edu和http://ted.bti.cornell.edu/epigenome/).)公开发布数据所有发现的基因都将免费提供给所有人用于标记辅助育种。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Tomato is the most valuable fruit or vegetable grown worldwide. This project uses genetics and biochemistry to understand how the tomato synthesizes flavor and nutritional chemicals. Flavor and nutrition are critical targets for improvement of agricultural crops in our modern society. Unhealthy shifts in diets can be countered by producing more flavorful, attractive and nutritious foods. Globally, biofortified food crops can address micronutrient malnutrition affecting millions of the poorest people. Better tasting, more nutritious, longer shelf-life food crops could have far reaching effects on world food production and sustainability. If fruits and vegetables taste better, people will eat more of them. Tomato fruit ripening involves simultaneous expression of more than 1000 genes. How the many metabolic pathways involved in different aspects of ripening are regulated is largely unknown. This project uses systems approaches to identify the regulators of each pathway, defining a regulatory hierarchy of genetic control on the entire process. The knowledge gained will in turn facilitate improvements in specific traits such as flavor and vitamin content. In addition to interdisciplinary training of the next generation of scientists, a citizen science project will leverage the public's keen interest in tomatoes. Individuals will be enrolled in an amateur plant breeding program to identify new varieties for the home garden. They will collect data on performance of experimental lines relative to a standard check variety, Better Boy, across North America. The citizen input will be the basis for which varieties are released.Prior efforts have established the tomato fruit as a paradigm for understanding the genetic control of complex, multigenic traits. The unifying project objective is to identify regulators of important fruit ripening, nutrient and flavor pathway genes to facilitate both more complete understanding of fruit maturation and develop tools for crop improvement. This project uses a systems approach involving genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, physiology, genomics, informatics and metabolomics to define important components of the regulation of fruit quality-related processes and pathways and functionally characterize identified genes. Public genomics resources enabling additional tomato and translational research for improvement of additional fruit crops will be developed. Specific research objectives center on development of data sets that shed light on regulatory interactions, analysis of resulting data with the goal of functional characterization of a subset of high priority regulatory genes and public release of data through existing databases (http://ted.bti.cornell.edu and http://ted.bti.cornell.edu/epigenome/). All of the discovered genes will be freely available to all for marker-assisted breeding.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.