High lycopene chlorophyll correlation

[bower]

Originally Posted by loeb

I wonder what is needed to make a high chlorophyll tomato.. like, dark green inside, when ripe.

I had something like this turn up in my F2 of Stupice X Black Cherry this year. The fruit were unusually dark from the outside too, and looked almost really black in some lights (cw the various browns and pinks we are used to). It wasn't one of my selections because it wasn't especially early, but a friend said it was her favourite so I have saved a few seeds of the 'Blackest Cherry' in case she wants to grow some out. I could send you a few if you want to use it in your breeding, or wait and see what happens with the segregation in F3.

No idea whether the high chlorophyll is a stabilized trait at F2 or not.
All of the fruit from this cross had lots of dark green before ripe, but in the case of pinks and reds it could still be a gf allele in the mix.

Frogsleap mentioned in his recent blog that best tasting fruit were often high in chlorophyll or gf selections. I didn't find that dark shoulders alone was a guarantee of good taste, but in the final analysis, all of the best tasting selections were unusually darker than the others with lots of chlorophyll, so I have to agree with his observations.

[nicollas]

From my research about hight lycopene varieties, something interesting came up but i've been unable to find the germplasm even in the catalog of some spanish genebanks. If anyone can get its hands on it ...

Three mutants of L. esculentum with high pigment accumulation, one commercial hybrid, two experimental breeding lines and one tomato variety for processing were used as controls in comparisons made with different tomato types. A very interesting L. esculentum traditional Spanish variety (UPV17790) was selected with 4 times the lycopene content of the commercial hybrid control and 1.35 times the content of the mutant controls.

From "EVALUATION AND SELECTION OF LYCOPERSICON ACCESSIONS FOR HIGH CAROTENOID AND VITAMIN C CONTENT"

What is interesting is that it has more lycopene than the hp and og^c mutant (if i guess correctly what mutants have been used in the study).

[nicollas]

Another high rated is a pimpinellifolium named BGV008166 from Ghana with a good score of 271 mg/Kg