Development of Some Salinity Tolerant Tomato Mutants Using Gamma-Irradiation

Abstract

Salinity stress is one abiotic stress that severely affects the crop yield. Tomato is one of the most important vegetable plants in the world which is also more sensitive to salinity stress. Therefore, this study's aim to create more salinity-tolerant tomato plants having desirable traits. Seeds of two commercial tomato cultivars (Super Strain B and Castle Rock) have been exposed to different doses of gamma rays (100, 200, 300 and 400 Gy), and the mutants were evaluated under salinity stress conditions during two successive generations (M0 and M1) in the field and one generation (M2) in greenhouse. Various abnormal phenotypic changes were observed in the M0 generation. Moreover, at both the M1 and M2 generations, all the evaluated traits significantly differed among the studied genotypes. Furthermore, some induced mutants, especially the C-10 mutant, had superiority over the origin cultivars in fruit yield production under saline conditions. Thus, these mutants could be used in breeding programs to generate more salinity-tolerant lines.

Keywords

• gamma rays
• genetic variation
• solanum lycopersicum l
• mutation
• tomatoes