Genetic Control of Inheritance of Fruit Quality Attributes in Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum)

The experiment comprised of seven tomato inbred lines (two processing and five fresh market) and 21 F-1 hybrids produced by crossing of them in a 7 x 7 half diallel fashion excluding the reciprocals. The study was conducted at the Haramaya University, Ethiopia during July 2015 to June 2016 to analyze the genetics of inheritance of some physical and chemical quality traits. A randomized complete block design with three replications was used to conduct the experiment. Among the studied characters, only shape index and titratable acidity fulfilled the additive-dominance hypothesis. Therefore, non-allelic gene interaction could be involved in the inheritance of the characters which did not fit the model. The parental line Roma VF contained mostly recessive genes with increasing effects for shape index, and the parental lines Marglobe and Eshete contained mostly recessive genes with the increasing effects for titratable acidity. Therefore, employing these lines in hybridization for shape index and titratable acidity improvement could be ineffective, since the rapid increased frequency of recessive alleles which is the cause of loss of vigor could be resulted in advancing generation.