Location: Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research
Project Number: 8062-21000-050-015-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2022
End Date: Aug 31, 2025
Objective:
The objective of this cooperative research project is to further develop and implement high resolution transcriptome and metabolite analysis toward identifying genes underlying fruit development and quality traits. Central to this effort, will be the expertise of the cooperator in phenotyping fruit tissues, especially as related to cell wall and cuticle characteristics in addition to isolation and characterization of metabolites from the same targeted tissues from which we are capturing gene expression data. The collaborator will also be essential in characterizing cell wall and metabolic phenotypes in transgenic plants altered in genes hypothesized to underly these traits.
Approach:
The cooperator provides additional capacity in laser capture micro-dissection of plant tissues and is a world expert in cell wall, cuticle, and related tissue analyses - cell and tissue components essential to fruit shelf-life texture and consumer quality traits. The cooperator is also expert in biochemical analyses and will assist in analysis of nutritional metabolites. ARS is proficient in tomato gene expression, genome sequencing, epigenome analysis and generation of stable transformed tomato lines edited for candidate genes related to the traits of interest. The complementary skills and mutual interests of the ARS and the collaborator make this a synergistic collaboration.
