Heat stress tolerance of tomato & pepper

Start date: 1 August 2021
End date: 31 July 2024

Harnessing crop tolerance to elevated temperatures is essential for sustaining vegetable production in tropical areas and will become even more important under climate change scenarios. Heat tolerance is complex and composed of many component traits, each of which likely have complex inheritance patterns. Dry and humid heat may affect crops in a different manner. Therefore, heat stress tolerance screening is best complemented by multilocation field trials to test the response to various kinds of heat.

How does the project address the issue?

The project aims to identify new sources of heat stress tolerance and characterize the major component traits associated with heat tolerance for pepper and tomato. The project will conduct:

• Multilocation trialing of WorldVeg developed tomato and pepper heat tolerant sources managed by member companies.
• Advanced phenotyping of select sources of heat tolerant material in controlled environments.
• Screening of segregating breeding populations for heat tolerance to provide a basis for future research.

What results are expected?

• Sources of heat tolerance validated in tomato and pepper under humid and dry conditions
• Correlation determined between pollen activity, pollen number and fruit set for more efficient selection.
• Association between individual heat tolerance traits (measured in controlled environmental conditions) and performance of lines in multilocation trials for improved selection efficiency and a basis for future gene discovery and marker assisted selection.