Materials

Materials

Within Harnesstom, a repository of tomato accessions with promising and interesting traits and performance has been selected following the information collected in previous EU-funded projects. These 241 varieties represent a vault of biodiversity for tomato cultivated forms, that can be of interest to farmers, chefs and consumers. The selected panel of 25 of accessions described in the table below will be used in the Farmer and Citizen Science experiments.

Each Citizen scientist will receive a seed sample (about ten seeds) of five of these varieties, to be grown in their conditions and scored for characteristics of interest and preferences. Most of these varieties represent landraces, that means genotypes evolved in a specific environment, under specific agronomic techniques without a professional breeding effort. These varieties, that are still grown and appreciated at a local scale and often present outstanding qualities, are generally excluded from the seed market. Modern tomato breeding has developed professionally improved varieties, first based on pure lines (homozygous genotypes) and more recently on F ₁ hybrids (seeds obtained by crossing two selected parents). Varieties in the modern seed marker are often very productive, resistant to diseases and pests, but many times lack organoleptic quality and are anonymous to the consumer.

Each variety in the panel comes along with the following information:

Code:
Each accession has a unique code in the repository (eg. RH134) that should be kept to identify all plants through cultivation.

Name:
The name with which the variety is recognized.

Use:
Tomatoes are generally distinguished in varieties for processing, to generate pasta, juice, passata, etc. (a specific type is for peeling) and for fresh market, that include salad tomatoes (generally big-fruited), cocktail tomatoes (cherry and datterino types), or winter types (to be stored due to their capacity to stay for long time in storage conditions).

Origin:
The place that variety is coming from (where it has been “selected”).