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

西红柿是世界上种植的最有价值的水果或蔬菜。这个项目利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。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饮食中不健康的变化。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困人口的微量营养素营养不良问题。口感更好、营养更丰富、保质期更长的粮食作物可能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，人们就会吃得更多。番茄果实的成熟涉及1000多个基因的同时表达。在成熟的不同方面所涉及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识别每个途径的调节者，定义整个过程中遗传控制的调节层次。所获得的知识反过来将有助于改善特定性状，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之外，一个公民科学项目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，为家庭花园识别新品种。他们将在北美各地收集与标准检查品种“更好的男孩”相关的实验品系的性能数据。市民的意见将成为发布品种的基础。先前的研究已经将番茄果实作为理解复杂、多基因性状遗传控制的范例。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因子，以促进对水果成熟的更全面的了解，并为作物改良开发工具。该项目采用涉及遗传学、生物化学、分子生物学、生理学、基因组学、信息学和代谢组学的系统方法来定义水果品质相关过程和途径的重要调控成分，并对已鉴定的基因进行功能表征。将开发公共基因组资源，使更多的番茄和转化研究能够改善更多的水果作物。具体的研究目标集中在数据集的开发上，这些数据集揭示了调控相互作用，分析结果数据，目标是高优先级调控基因子集的功能特征，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。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.