Biodiversity of Photosynthetic Pigments, Macronutrients Uptake and Fruit Quality of Tomato Genotypes

Screening genotypes considers an effective method to enhance genetic improvement before releasing plant breeding program efforts based on the observed variation. This study investigates the genotypic diversity of photosynthetic pigments, macronutrient uptake of tomato leaves and fruit quality. It also measures the correlation coefficient of fruit quality traits with their leaves' physical-chemical parameters of twelve tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) genotypes ('6416 F1', '218 F1', 'Bokary', 'Chizhik', 'Corrida', 'Delfo F1', 'Fokker F1', 'Goldstone', 'Malinovka', 'Petrovsky', 'Siberian', and 'Tyler F1'). Tomato genotypes varied concerning chlorophyll, carotene, macronutrient contents in their leaves and characteristics of fruit quality. The highest values for tomato fruit quality such as ASA, lycopene, TSS, maturity degree and taste index were obtained from '218 F1', 'Fokker F1' and 'Siberian' genotypes. ASA, DM, TSS, and taste index of tomato fruits positively correlates with photosynthetic pigments, nitrogen and potassium contents of tomato leaves. There was a negative correlation of maturity degree with nitrogen and phosphorus contents. Inserting '218 F1', 'Fokker F1' and 'Siberian' genotypes into tomato breeding programs for increased TSS, lycopene, taste index in tomato fruits is subject to these challenges because these traits had very high heritability ratios (95.6, 98.1 and 95.3%). Furthermore, ten primers showed a total of 45 amplified products to perform RAPD Analysis. Primers OPA-03, OPG-09, OPA-02, OPA-01 and OPA-14 viewed the highest values for polymorphism percentage P%, polymorphism information content (PIC), marker index (MI) and Resolving power (Rp), respectively. UPGMA cluster analysis divided genotypes into three groups. The first cluster was the largest and contains seven genotypes, while the third one was the smallest contains two genotypes. Single marker analysis indicated that the associated markers with studied biochemical traits were probably candidate markers linked to them.