“…Most of the hybrids outperformed their best parent and best commercial hybrid for all the traits, suggesting the high potential of the newly developed hybrids to compete with commercial varieties for off-season production in hot dry regions. The existence of heterosis has been reported for several agronomic traits (fruit weight, fruit setting percentage, yield, plant height) in tomatoes (Basté et al, 2010;Krieger et al, 2010;Shalaby, 2013;Solieman et al, 2013) and metabolites and fruit quality traits (Basté et al, 2010;Fortuny et al, 2021;Shalaby, 2013) under optimal temperature growing conditions and heat stress (Bhattarai et al, 2016;Scott et al, 1986). Previous studies reported maximum mid-parent heterosis values of 37.75% (Emami et al, 2018), 104.39% (Liu et al, 2021), and 108% (Liu et al, 2021) for yield under optimal conditions and 84.79% under heat stress (Bhattarai et al, 2016).…”