Genetic background of flavour: the case of the tomato

Publisher Summary Flavor is understood as all the perceptions one feels in the mouth and thus encompasses taste, aroma, and texture. Tomato breeders have improved fruit yield and stability, plant adaptation, and disease resistances. Fruit size and appearance, firmness, and shelf life have also been tremendously modified by breeding, but flavor has not been a target for long. Due to the complaints of consumers about tomato taste, genetic improvement of tomato fruit quality is required. The complexity of tomato fruit quality, due to the number of parameters to take into account, their polygenic inheritance, and their multiple interactions, has limited genetic progress. Today, molecular markers enable the dissection of the genetic basis of complex traits and the increasing knowledge about the tomato genome offers new efficient tools to breeders. This chapter presents the knowledge on genetic diversity and inheritance of tomato flavor related traits. The genetic basis of fruit quality traits in tomato has been studied in several progenies and the chapter summarizes the information provided by Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) studies. The chapter further presents the results of a marker-assisted selection scheme designed to improve fruit quality, the major genes identified as involved in fruit quality, and the future prospects offered by the new high throughput genomic approaches available today.