Integrated genomics approaches using introgression lines of tomato

To evaluate components of fruit metabolic composition, we have previously metabolically phenotyped tomato introgression lines (ILs) containing segmental substitutions of wild species chromosome in the genetic background of a cultivated variety. These studies facilitated the identification of a vast number of quantitative trait loci (QTL) for a large number of primary metabolites. To place these results in a relevant content we carried out morphological phenotyping in parallel. Cartographic network analyses revealed that fruit metabolite composition was broadly conserved within compound classes but perhaps more significantly negatively correlated with harvest index. These data prompted us to expand our work in two directions. Firstly, to analyse the metabolite content in other tissues of the ILs in order to gain a better physiological understanding of this finding and secondly to adopt a range of approaches including candidate gene mapping and reverse genetic strategies and transcriptomics in order to achieve higher genetic resolution. The current status of this work and a perspective of the possibilities of metabolomics assisted selection will be presented.