A team led by Prof. Huang Sanwen at the Shenzhen Agricultural Genomics Institute of CAAS published an article titled "Rewrite the fruit metabolome in tomato breeding" in Cell. The metabolic changes of tomato fruits during the process of domestication, improvement, divergence and introgression were comprehensively revealed for the first time. Genetic loci controlling nutrients and flavor substances were identified, and new metabolic regulation methods were discovered. The study provides a hint to the genetic regulation of flavor and nutrients in tomatoes and to the whole-genome design breeding.

Generation and integration of multi-omics data. A, layout of the study. B, genomic distribution of mGWAS and eQTL. C, network built on correlation among metabolites, genes, and SNPs.