GRAS family transcription factors are involved in multiple biological processes in plants. Here, we report that GRAS2 plays a vital role in regulating fruit weight in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). We establish that the expression of GRAS2 was elevated in ovaries and maintained at a constant level in fertilized ovules. Reduction of GRAS2 expression in transgenic plants reduced fruit weight thro...

Peroxidase (EC 1.11.1.7)-mediated stiffening of cell walls within the fruit skin of tomato is hypothesized to regulate fruit growth. However, to date, there is no experimental evidence demonstrating that peroxidase affects the mechanical properties of skin tissue. Here, the mechanical properties of skin strips excised from a range of fruits at different ages were determined using an 'Instron' u...

ABSTRACT Five Capsicum species were tested for susceptibility to Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) and the mild strain of TYLCV (TYLCV-Mld). TYLCV was able to infect 30 of 55 genotypes of C. annuum, one of six genotypes of C. chinense, one of two genotypes of C. baccatum, and the only genotype of C. frutescens tested but was unable to infect the one genotype of C. pubescens tested. This is ...

LMM15, an actinomycete with broad spectrum antifungal activity, was isolated from a diseased tomato leaf using the baiting technique. A phylogenetic tree analysis based on similarity percentage of 16S rDNA sequences showed that the bacterium was 97.0% affiliated with the species Streptomyces pratensis. This strain was therefore coded as S. pratensis LMM15. The ferment filtrate of LMM15 had abil...

ABSTRACT Two tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV)-resistant plants from accessions LA1777 and LA386 of the wild tomato species Lycopersicon hirsutum have been crossed. The resulting resistant F1 plants were crossed with the domesticated tomato L. esculentum, and a series of selfing was performed. At each generation, individuals were selected for resistance (no symptoms and undetectable viral D...

Supplementary lighting is frequently applied in the winter season for crop production in greenhouses. The effect of supplementary lighting on plant growth depends on the balance between assimilate production in source leaves and the overall capacity of the plants to use assimilates. This study aims at quantifying the source-sink balance and carbohydrate content of three tomato cultivars differi...

Tomato fruit is renowned for its high concentration of phyto-nutrients such as lycopene and carotenoids, overall contribution to nutrition and human health. The effect of antisense suppression of ethylene receptor genes LeETR1 and LeETR2 over the quality of tomato fruit was investigated in this paper. During the different stages of ripening, the fruit of antisense transgenic tomatoes of ale1 an...

The ripening inhibitor (rin) mutant tomato yields non-ripening fruit, and the rin hybrid fruit (RIN/rin) shows an intermediate phenotype between the wild and mutant fruit, that is, red-ripe and extended shelf life. We found by a microarray analysis that the genes encoding possible allergenic proteins were expressed at a significantly lower level in the rin hybrid fruit than in the wild-type fru...

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) draft genome, along with a draft of the wild relative, Solanum pimpinellifolium, were released in 2012, almost a decade after the International Tomato Genome project was initiated. Tomato is an important domesticated crop species, as well as a model organism for many aspects of plant biology such as fleshy fruit development, ripening, disease resistance, plant ...