Inventory and conservation:
A common descriptor system has been developed for the four crops. Existing passport and phenotypic data, including images, have been collected for approximately 55,000 accessions of the four crops, as detailed in Table 1:
All data have been uploaded on the G2P-SOL gateway (
http://www.g2p-sol.eu/G2P-SOL-gateway.html(si apre in una nuova finestra)) and are publicly accessible to all users since Jan 1st, 2020.
Description and assessment
Low density genotyping protocols, able to score 2.000-5.000 genetic loci have been optimized and utilized to genotype approximately 38.000 accessions and prebreeding lines from the four crops, as detailed in Table 2.
The data have been added to the G2P-SOL gateway. The pepper data are public, those from the other three crops will be made public upon publication of the relative papers.
Five core collections (tomato, eggplant, pepper, South American and European potatoes), composed of 300-400 individuals each and representing the global or (in the case of potato) regional diversity of these crops have been constructed on the basis of phenotypic parameters and the low density genotyping data, and distributed to the phenotyping partners. At least two field trials/crop have been conducted for all five core collections. Phenotyping has been conducted using common protocols and metabolic profiling has been completed for tomato, eggplant and pepper. Trials for selected biotic/abiotic stress resistance traits have been also conducted.
The core collections of tomato and eggplant have been resequenced to 20x depth, while those of potato and pepper have been subjected to high density genotyping. Additionally, 16 genotypes of pepper, 47 wild accessions of eggplant, 30 of potato and 42 of tomato were resequenced to 20x-40x depth, for a total of over 5 Terabases.
The resequencing of the tomato and eggplant core collections generated, respectively, 30.1 M and 51.6 M Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) of which, after filtering, 1.02 M and 1.32 M were used for Genome Wide Association mapping. The numbers of SNPs were much lower for pepper and potato, which were subjected to GBS (Table 3). These SNPs were used together with tens (potato) or hundreds (tomato, eggplant, pepper) traits measured in the core collections for Genome Wide Association Studies, generating thousands of highly significant SNP/trait associations.
Pre-breeding
Over 50 segregating populations of the four crops, derived from intra- or inter-specific crosses are being assessed for a variety of novel quality- and disease resistance-related traits. A number of known agronomic traits have been introgressed into novel elite germplasm in a first wave of pre-breeding, and a number of novel traits have been validated for use in a second wave of prebreeding, as detailed below. The numbers of these traits are well above the 2-3 traits/crop that were initially planned.
Eggplant: known 6; novel 11; Pepper: known 6; novel 7; Tomato: known 8; novel 3; Potato: known 3; novel 4. (Table 4).
Dissemination, valorisation and training
The project results have been disseminated, up to now, through 69 press releases, the participation to 36 conferences/workshops/scientific events and 52 peer-reviewed, open access scientific papers. A list of all publications can be found on the G2P-SOL website (
http://www.g2p-sol.eu/Publications.html(si apre in una nuova finestra)). Two early stage training schools on the use of genetic resources have been organized, respectively, in Hyderabad, India and Lima, Perù two advanced training schools in Wageningen, the Netherlands and and on line. The project’s final workshop (
http://www.g2p-sol.eu/G2P%2DSOL%2DFinal%2DWorkshop.html(si apre in una nuova finestra)) attracted over 1,000 participants from 61 countries (Figure 1). The project’s Twitter account (@solgenetics) has gained over 300 followers.
