Fruit Integrative Modelling (FRIM)

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Commercial fruit production is under significant pressure from environmental stresses, exacerbated by climate change, but also from changes in the consumer's demand for taste and nutritional value. One of the key goals of fruit biology is therefore to understand the factors that influence the contents of the ripe fruit that influence flavour and quality. Both genetic and environmental factors have a strong and multifaceted influence on fruit quality. They usually act and interact in such a complex way that it is extremely difficult to study their effects experimentally. It is possible to generate experimentally-derived models of fruit development in response to environmental conditions, but such models alone do not reveal how the genetic variation between different tomato cultivars, which acts on biochemical and cellular processes, affects the outcome. At a different level, it is also possible to make models of the metabolism inside the developing fruit which can predict how fast different components of the tomato are being made, but such models do not incorporate the cumulative effects of the environmental influences on the plant and fruit. The aim of this project is to combine these two modelling approaches so that it is possible to predict how the fruit of particular genetic variants will develop under a variety of environmental conditions, and in that way to select rationally tomato strains with desirable qualities.