Metabolomics of a Model Fruit: Tomato

Abstract

Tomato has quickly become a favoured species for metabolomics research. Tomato fills a niche that cannot be occupied by Arabidopsis, particularly regarding studies on fleshy fruit. Variations in genotype and phenotype have been broadly exploited using metabolomics approaches in order to gain a better understanding of fundamental aspects of plant physiology, fruit growth and fruit development. The commercial importance of tomato as one of the world's most important and widely grown and consumed vegetables is a significant driving force behind this fruit research. Therefore, many metabolomics studies have specifically been focused on traits of importance to the food and agro-industries. Fruit quality, nutritional value as well as the influence on these traits of fruit storage, transport and processing into pasteurized and cooked products have also been subjects for extensive metabolomics analyses. These studies have already considerably expanded our knowledge, and continue to do so, concerning many aspects of the tomato fruit phenotype, both visible and chemical. Furthermore, increased knowledge of the genetics of tomato, the recently available draft of the tomato genome sequence as well as the emerging technologies for next generation sequencing, large-scale phenotyping and systems biology approaches have generated many novel research concepts that are also placing metabolomics analyses of tomatoes right at the forefront of fruit research.

Genetic Diversity in Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) and Its Wild Relatives

“…Metabolomics has an important role to play in characterization of natural diversity in tomato (Schauer, Zamir et al 2004;Fernie et al 2011). As well, it can boost the biochemical understanding of fruit content and be an enhancer for quality breeding (Fernie and Schauer 2009;de Vos, Hall et al 2011).…”

Metabolomic profiling in tomato reveals diel compositional changes in fruit affected by source–sink relationships

“…Liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS) of semi-polar extracts provides relative quantification of secondary metabolites belonging to several families of compounds including flavonoids, hydroxycinnamates, and glycoalkaloids. Such analytical approaches have largely been used recently for crop species including tomato ( de Vos et al , 2011 ). However, source–sink studies involving metabolomics remain rare for fruit crops.…”

Crops and Tasty, Nutritious Food – How Can Metabolomics Help?

“…Here, however, we shall just give a short summary of the main findings as this topic has been extensively been covered elsewhere (de Vos et al, 2011b). Tomato has become the model fruit crop for many biological studies and is a favorite for many prominent groups working on the development and application of metabolomics technologies to forward our understanding of important aspects of the fruits in terms of development, ripening process, functional genomics analysis, metabolic engineering etc (Bovy et al, 2007(Bovy et al, , 2010Schijlen et al, 2008;Fernie & Schauer, 2009;Osorio et al, 2009;de Vos et al, 2011a).…”