Metabolic Engineering Of Health Alternatives And High Yield In Tomato

Plants are the natural source of nutrients in human diet.In order to get food with high yield and quality,several important traits have been achieved.These include improvement in resistance to abiotic/biotic stresses,yield components,macro or mineral nutrients,and shelflife,both individually and in combination.Usually the most success comes from the manipulation of key enzymes and/or transcription factors that controlled the underlying biological processes of these traits.Although substantial progress has been made in elucidating the biological processes that underlying these traits,it remains mysterious whether these apparently unrelated traits are coordinately regulated in nature.Here we report the identification of a MIXTA-like MYB gene Sl MX1 in tomato.The tomato Alica craige as Wild-type,three Sl MX1 overexpression and two RNAi lines were used in all experiments of this study.Sl MX1 simultaneously regulates developmental,physiological and metabolic processes that determine all the traits above,likely through transcriptional regulation of the key genes in these processes.Moreover,over-expression of Sl MX1 results in substantially increased broad-spectrum resistance to a wide-range of abiotic and biotic stresses,fruit quality,shelf-life,and yield in tomato.Our study provides a novel example of breeding crops with multiple desirable traits by manipulating a single regulatory gene.