Physiological characterization of tomato introgression line IL5-4 that increases brix and blossom-end rot in ripening fruit

Fruit Brix is an important indicator in determining the quality of tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum), and increasing it is an important objective. The production of high Brix tomatoes requires breeding and genetic studies of fruit. During domestication S. lycopersicum lost genetic variation of some wild tomato relative that could be useful for breeding. In this study, we investigated introgression lines (ILs) from a cross between the wild relative Solanum pennellii and the cultivated tomato S. lycopersicum ‘M82’. While there are many genetic and physiological studies that demonstrate the usefulness of tomato S. pennellii ILs, few have investigated the high Brix values of IL fruit. Accordingly, we attempted to detect tomato ILs that resulted in high Brix ripening fruit, in order to obtain valuable genetic and genomic resources for the investigation of phenotypes originating in the S. pennellii genome. IL5-4 may be a line that carries an S. pennellii chromosome segment on chromosome 5 of ‘M82’. Previous research indicated that IL5-4 fruit have higher Brix levels than ‘M82’ fruit. Our results corroborated these findings and revealed Brix changes in fruit during development. We also found that IL5-4 plants showed a higher incidence of blossom-end rot (BER), a major physiological disorder in tomatoes. Therefore, we investigated the physiological mechanism responsible for the higher incidence of BER in IL5-4, by focusing on calcium content, which may be related to BER occurrence. The total and water-soluble Ca contents of fruit tissues were significantly lower in IL5-4 than in ‘M82’ in the proximal part, while no differences were observed in the distal part. Thus, our results suggested that a higher incidence of BER in IL5-4 fruit may not be related to both total and water-soluble Ca contents in the distal fruit tissue, and genetic factors originating in the S. pennellii chromosome may induce high BER incidence in IL5-4. The characterization of IL5-4 in this study showed that it is a valuable genetic and genomic resource for high-Brix breeding stock and for the investigation of novel BER mechanisms.