A b s t r a c tClassic genetic methods remain actual in practice and study of inheritance and heritability of the main commercial crop traits. Solanum lycopersicum L. genetics is well developed, but the special approach is necessary to solve special breeding tasks. Heritability analysis of the main traits in F 1 tomato progeny, which we have been carried out in 2009-2011, revealed some regularity to be further used in breeding practice. We first found that the main fruit yield parameters of Solanum lycopersicum L., the average fruit weight (h 2 = 0.99) and the average fruit number per plant (h 2 = 0.96), are inherited on the maternal side, and dwarfism (h 2 = 0.83) and early ripening (h 2 = 0.73) are inherited on the paternal side. Effectiveness of the target hybridization method developed earlier has been tested in this paper. Productive maternal plants with larger-sized fruits and early ripening dwarf paternal plants were involved in target crossings. F 1 hybrids and their F 2 progeny resulted from selfpollination of F 1 plants were produced. Analysis of dwarfism inheritance in three F 2 hybrid combinations using  2 criterion confirmed recessiveness of d gene. The tall plants and the dwarf plants of F 2 population segregated strictly by Mendel's low (3:1). By dispersion analysis of six parental forms and three hybrids, we selected the more productive plants with large fruit size among the dwarf plants, then obtained seed progeny of these plants and studied the heritability of two traits, the dwarfism and large fruit size, in the F 3 hybrids. It was found out that crossing between tall maternal plants with large fruit size and dwarf early ripening paternal plants resulted in lowering the plant height to that of dwarf father. This trait was maintained in F 3 that confirmed the correctness of conclusions have earlier been made by us. Heritability of average fruit weight on the maternal side also has been confirmed in F 3 progeny. In F 3 hybrids derived from crossing maternal plants Vspishka and Krainiy Sever with large fruit size the average fruit weight increased 2 times compared to the parental forms. This trait is maintained in progeny despite negative effects of d genes on some quantitative characteristics. Use of high productive maternal forms with small fruits size resulted in lowering average fruit weight in the hybrid progenies. So, dwarfism of Solanum lycopersicum L., desirable in multi circle hydroponic technology, is inherited on the parental side, and the fruit weigh is inherited on the maternal side. Thus, to obtain new tomato forms for multi circle hydroponics, the maternal plants with large fruit size and dwarf paternal forms should be crossed.

The relevance of vertical vegetable growing is due to the need to ensure an uninterrupted supply of food and reduce the cost of food production in terms of moving the majority of the population of the Earth into urban space. The market of vertical vegetable growing can be characterized as capacious and fast-growing. In the Russian Federation, this market is still developing. The main vegetable crops are not represented in it. The purpose of the study was to create tomato varieties for the vertical vegetable growing (multi-tiered hydroponic plants). For this purpose, a new approach to the breeding process was necessary, in which the variety would be considered as an element of the technological chain. A collection of 692 tomato samples served as our research material. Research methods included the following: creating a model of a new form of tomato for multi-tiered hydroponic structures; analyzing the genetic basis of the characteristic “short stature” in Solanum lycopersicum L.; conducting an individual selection from sporophyte variety populations; testing selected samples in a multi-tiered narrow-rack hydroponics installation; selecting the most large-fruited and productive samples; transferring new varieties to the State Variety Testing (GSI), and analyzing the economic efficiency of cultivating new varieties on multi-tiered hydroponic installation. As a result, in the Federal Scientific Center for Vegetable Growing, the first varieties of tomato vertical vegetables such as “Natasha” (Patent of the Russian Federation No. 9060) and “Timosha” (Patent of the Russian Federation No. 9059) were obtained. Our analysis of the economic efficiency of tomato cultivation on multi-tiered narrow-rack hydroponics demonstrated the convincing advantages of such a method of tomato cultivation as compared to the traditional cultivation method.

This paper focuses on hierarchical clustering of categorical data and compares two approaches which can be used for this task. The first one, an extremely common approach, is to perform a binary transformation of the categorical variables into sets of dummy variables and then use the similarity measures suited for binary data. These similarity measures are well examined, and they occur in both commercial and non-commercial software. However, a binary transformation can possibly cause a loss of information in the data or decrease the speed of the computations. The second approach uses similarity measures developed for the categorical data. But these measures are not so well examined as the binary ones and they are not implemented in commercial software. The comparison of these two approaches is performed on generated data sets with categorical variables and the evaluation is done using both the internal and the external evaluation criteria. The purpose of this paper is to show that the binary transformation is not necessary in the process of clustering categorical data since the second approach leads to at least comparably good clustering results as the first approach.

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