Traditional Eastern Spanish varieties of tomato

Abstract

Despite the importance of traditional varieties of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.)as sources of variation in breeding programs and varieties targeted to high-price quality markets that value their exceptional organoleptic quality, little is known regarding the structure of these materials at the morphological level. In this study, a collection of 166 populations (137 of them during two years) of traditional varieties of tomato from the east coast of Spain has been characterized using 41 descriptors. The characterization revealed a considerable variation. The segregation observed in several populations (28 %) suggests that apart from the configuration as population varieties, the high variation present in these landraces may be partially due to possible seed mixing and spontaneous cross-pollination. Only nine fruit descriptors were required to represent the variation present in the collection analyzed. It seems that after spontaneous crosspollinations, farmers applied strong selection to a small number of traits, though even in these traits a high level of variation is maintained. The variation observed may hinder clear recognition by the consumer, an attribute required for the consolidation of quality markets. Additionally, a registry of these materials as conservation varieties would be complicated considering the actual levels of variation. Therefore, a varietal depuration would be interesting in order to promote in situ conservation of these resources. Finally, the high levels of variation in the intra-varietal scale may justify the collection and maintenance of more populations of the same variety as the risk of conserving duplicates would not be so high.Keywords: Solanum lycopersicum, genetic resources, breeding, genebank collection (e.g. the name of the town or county) or to its use (e.g. salad tomato) only. It is therefore necessary to clarify if these designations correspond to specific varieties or if they can be ascribed to a certain existing variety and the general designation in passport data corresponds to inaccurate recording during collections.Several efforts have been made to characterize Spanish materials (Alonso et al., 2009; García-Martínez et al., 2006Casals et al., 2011Casals et al., , 2012 CebollaCornejo et al., 2013). However few of them analyze morphological data, and either they are usually restricted to one or few varieties, or the varieties analyzed have in general ambiguous designations (e.g. Gragera-Facundo et al., 2011).In this context, this study mainly aims to continue previous efforts (Cebolla-Cornejo et al., 2013) to characterize a different set of populations and increase the number of varieties. This considerably large set of populations belonging to traditional varieties typical of the East Coast of Spain will enable a further study that will focus on how they are structured. This information would be of great value in the promotion of on-farm conservation of this diversity as well as to the provision of new information for the management of germplasm banks. Mater...

Mediterranean Long Shelf-Life Landraces: An Untapped Genetic Resource for Tomato Improvement

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Assessment of biochar and hydrochar as minor to major constituents of growing media for containerized tomato production

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