HUANGPU SHANGHAI

On April 6, an article was published online in Nature Genetics, a monthly journal publishing the best research in the field of genetics, showing that the Processing Tomato Breeding Innovation Group of the Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, together with other units, constructed the world's first tomato super-pangenome.

Li Ning (L), an associate research fellow of the Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences and his teammate check tomato plants. [Photo/Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences]

This research extended the tomato pangenome to a super-pangenome covering 11 species in the solanum genus for the first time, providing a platform for research into population-scale SV genotyping.

In assistance with the super-pangenome, researchers identified a wild tomato gene that could increase fruit yield by an average of 67.1 percent in OE transgenic lines, which may greatly increase tomato production in the future.

The research is led by the Processing Tomato Breeding Innovation Group of the Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences united with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Xinjiang University and many other units. In seven years of research, they collected nine wild tomato species and two cultivated accessions, applied several sequencing technologies, assembled 11 high-quality tomato genomes, and reconstructed the phylogeny of the Lycopersicon species.

It is the first time that the Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, has published scientific results in Nature Genetics as the first unit, marking a major breakthrough in breeding technology in Xinjiang.

Li Ning, the study's first author and an associate research fellow of the Innovation Group, said: "This research sheds light on the genetic improvement of tomatoes and basic frontier research of other crops' breeding, and also accelerates the breeding process of new varieties."

Wild tomatoes [Photo/IC]