Heterosis and Combining Ability Analysis of Fruit Yield, Early Maturity, and Quality in Tomato

Heterosis and combining ability are two important considerations in the utilization of heterosis, which can be used to generate excellent hybrid resource candidates and is very important in conventional hybrid breeding. In this study, the combining ability, heritability, and heterosis of eight major agronomic traits were analyzed in 10 tomato parents and 45 crosses between them. As well as TY-301, a recognized and official excellent variety that is currently selling well on the market was used as a control to conduct a control heterosis analysis, with the goal of selecting ideal parents with high combining ability and new hybrids with commodity value, high yield, early maturity, and high quality. The results showed that both additive and nonadditive genetic effects are involved in the expression of the traits and that the additive genetic effect is dominant in trait inheritance. Although general combining ability (GCA) and specific combining ability (SCA) were not correlated, and the strength of heterosis depends on SCA, the sum of the parental GCA values (GCAsum) did predict heterosis for some traits with higher predictive accuracy than did SCA. Compared with heterosis, GCAsum can better predict hybrid performance. Finally, the parent 17,969 was the breeding material with the best comprehensive trait performance, especially in yield. We screened a high-yielding candidate combination 17,927 x 17,969 and a precocious and good taste candidate combination 17,666 x 17,927. This information may play an important role in the selection of superior parents and hybrid combinations based on combining ability and heterosis analysis.

Automated summary

In tomato hybrid breeding, both heterosis and combining ability are important factors, with additive and non-additive genetic effects influencing trait expression. GCAsum can better predict hybrid performance, and parent 17,969 shows the best comprehensive trait performance among the studied materials.