A Solanum neorickii introgression population providing a powerful complement to the extensively characterized Solanum pennellii population.

We present a complementary resource for trait fine-mapping in tomato to those based on the intraspecific cross between cultivated tomato and the wild tomato species Solanum pennellii which have been extensively used for quantitative genetics in tomato over the last twenty years. The current population of backcross inbred lines (BILs) is composed of 107 lines derived after three backcrosses of progeny of the of the wild species S. neorickii (LA2133) and cultivated tomato (cultivar TA209) and is freely available to the scientific community. These S. neorickii BILs were genotyped using the 10K SOL-CAP single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) -Chip, and 3111 polymorphic markers were used to map recombination break points relative to the physical map of Solanum lycopersicum. The BILs harbor on average 4.3 introgressions per line with a mean introgression length of 34.7 Mbp allowing partitioning of the genome into 340 bins thereby facilitating rapid trait mapping. We demonstrate the power of using this resource in comparison to archival data from the S. pennellii resources by carrying out metabolic quantitative trait loci (mQTL), analysis following gas-chromatography mass spectrometry on fruits harvested from the S. neorickii BILs. The metabolic candidate genes phenylammonia lyase and cystathionine gamma-lyase were then tested and validated in F2 populations and via agroinfiltration based overexpression in order to exemplify the fidelity of this method in identifying the genes that drive tomato metabolic phenotypes. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.