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Research: Search for heat-tolerant tomatoes

27/04/2020

Sophie Colvine
USA,
North America
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A USD 3 million grant from the National Science Foundation has been awarded to a team of Wake Forest University researchers to determine why most tomato plants fail to pollinate when summer temperatures sit at 93.2 Fahrenheit (34.2 °C) for more than a few hours. 

The goal: develop more heat-tolerant tomatoes for future crops.

High temperatures during flowering and pollination can result in significant fruit losses, because of heat sensitivity of pollen tube growth. Different tomato varieties show significant differences in heat sensitivity of pollen tube growth. Making use of this naturally occurring variety, this project seeks to identify the molecular basis of adaptations that mitigate the yield-damaging consequences of heat stress during crop reproduction. The goal is to develop new tomato varieties that are fertile and continue to produce fruits at high temperature. 

It is hypothesized that thermotolerant tomato varieties express a pollen tube heat stress response that is either absent or diminished in thermosensitive cultivars and that the thermotolerant pistil buffers heat stress and facilitates pollen tube growth. To identify the molecular mechanisms of thermotolerance in tomato, transcription changes that accompany heat stress in pollen tubes and pistil will be measured in heat tolerant and heat sensitive tomato varieties. Haploid selection mapping of pollen tube heat tolerance will be performed, followed by experimental tests whether identified candidate genes are causally related to heat tolerance. 

This project will generate accessible and readily available community databases detailing reproductive gene expression responses to elevated temperature and registering genetic variants across hundreds of tomato genomes to enable analysis of heat stress adaptation and other traits. The project will define the transcriptional changes that accompany heat stress in the pollen tube and pistil, genetic variation responsible for pollen tube thermotolerance, and the functions of individual thermotolerance genes using reverse genetics.
 

The project will be undertaken by a coalition of scientists including Gloria Muday, Wake Forest University’s Charles M. Allen Professor of Biology and director of its Center for Molecular Signaling; pollen expert Mark Johnson of Brown University; James Pease, an assistant professor of biology at Wake Forest; Ann Loraine of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Ravishankar Palanivelu of the University of Arizona.

The project will also train undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in genome science, developmental biology, and computational analysis of genetic variation and  will build on a successful outreach program to teach plant genetics and the science of plant breeding and genetic engineering to more than 1000 9th grade students, tailoring it to focus on the effects of temperature stress on tomato reproduction.

“Looking at the data over the last few hundred years, the average temperature is going up, there are higher nighttime temperatures, and short bursts of elevated temperature that are sufficient to prevent plant reproduction.” Gloria Muday

“Genomic analysis of heat stress tolerance during tomato pollination” (NSF award number 1939255) runs through February 2024.

Sources: National Science Foundation, Wake Forrest University