Progetto H2020-SFS-2015-2 “A holistic multi-actors approach towards the design of new tomato varieties and management practices to improve yield and quality in face of climate change, TomGEM”

Climate change calls for designing new strategies for growing crops under harsh conditions. Indeed, the forecasted increase of the world population combined with the global changes in climate raises a major challenge for society to provide sufficient amounts of high nutritional and sensory quality food crops. TomGEM aims to design new strategies to maintain high yields of fruit and vegetables produced at harsh temperature conditions, using the tomato as a reference fleshy fruit crop. TomGEM considers all developmental processes contributing to yield; including flower initiation, pollen fertility and fruit set and implements trans-disciplinary approaches to investigate the impact of high temperature on these traits. TomGEM applies a multi-actor approach involving tomato producers and breeders to provide new targets and innovative breeding and management strategies to foster breeding of new tomato cultivars with improved yield under suboptimal temperature conditions. The main feature of the TomGEM project is that it associates in a coordinated effort the basic investigation of the mechanisms of heat tolerance related to yield, the exploration of available genetic resources to select best genotypes and the search for optimal cultural practices adapted to heat. The project relies on the active collaboration between scientists, breeders and producers. It is also important to point out that while selecting/creating new tomato varieties better adapted to elevated temperature, the project also aims to assess the effect of high temperature on the nutritional and post-harvest behaviour of tomato fruit. It is anticipated that the combined genetic, phenotyping and breeding approaches will lead (i) to a better understanding of the heat tolerance mechanisms, (ii) to uncover genomic loci that control yield stability at elevated temperature, (iii) to identify genotypes and accessions that are suitable to be used in breeding programs, (iv) to set up cultural practices that are compatible with abnormal environmental conditions, and (v) to provide a detailed assessment of the impact of high temperature on fruit nutritional and sensory qualities. Overall, the tailed multidisciplinary work plan in TomGEM applied to the heat tolerant tomato genotypes combined with the multilevel dissection of the key processes limiting tomato productivity under high temperatures will lead to a better knowledge of complex plant-environment interactions thus allowing the design of suitable combinations of genotypes and management practices adapted to the particular case of the impact of high temperature on yield stability of tomato fruit.