Development of SNP marker set for marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC) in cultivating tomato varieties

Marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC) is useful for selecting offspring with a highly recovered genetic background for a recurrent parent at early generation unlike rice and other field crops. Molecular marker sets applicable to practical MABC are scarce in vegetable crops including tomatoes. In this study, we used the National Center for Biotechnology Information- short read archive (NCBI-SRA) database that provided the whole genome sequences of 234 tomato accessions and selected 27,680 tag-single nucleotide polymorphisms (tag-SNPs) that can identify haplotypes in the tomato genome. From this SNP dataset, a total of 143 tag-SNPs that have a high polymorphism information content (PIC) value (> 0.3) and are physically evenly distributed on each chromosome were selected as a MABC marker set. This marker set was tested for its polymorphism in each pairwise cross combination constructed with 124 of the 234 tomato accessions, and a relatively high number of SNP markers polymorphic for the cross combination was observed. The reliability of the MABC SNP set was assessed by converting 18 SNPs into Luna probe-based high-resolution melting (HRM) markers and genotyping nine tomato accessions. The results show that the SNP information and HRM marker genotype matched in 98.6% of the experiment data points, indicating that our sequence analysis pipeline for SNP mining worked successfully. The tag-SNP set for the MABC developed in this study can be useful for not only a practical backcrossing program but also for cultivar identification and F1 seed purity test in tomatoes.