Shelf Life Evaluation in Selected Tomato (Solanum Lycopersicum L) F7 Recombinant Inbred Lines (RILs)

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L), one of the most important vegetable crop in the world is susceptible to rapid post harvest softening and poor shelf life leading to great post harvest losses. Among all strategies available for minimizing the postharvest losses, genetics approaches, very precisely conventional breeding coupled with modern marker technology is the promising one because of more acceptability by the consumer. We have evaluated twenty four F7 RIL'S developed from the cross L121 X Vaibhav for high shelf life. L121 is a parent having (alc gene) a ripening mutant is able to prolong shelf-life but has poor agronomic character; Vaibhav is the good agronomic cultivar released by the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore and Karnataka. The evaluation of F7 RILs resulted in the identification of tomato RILs with high shelf life. Among F7 RILs, parents and checks, the maximum shelf life was observed in RIL 7-3, RIL 110-2 (110days), followed by RIL 102-1 and RIL 182-4 (100 days) with an average shelf life of the F7 RILs were 63 days. Some genetic SSR polymorphic markers were identified to be associated with the fruit shelf-life which was determined by Single Marker Analysis (SMA). SMA revealed that the markers Tom184 and Tom144 are linked to high shelf life in tomato.