Abstract
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) has been an excellent model system for analysis of plant mechanism, which cannot easily be studied in Arabidopsis or rice, such as fruit physiology and secondary metabolites accumulation. To obtain information on the genetic mechanism of fruit ripening, we induced mutations in the tomato cultivar 'Micro-Tom' by irradiation with gamma ray or accelerated heavy ions, and screened for associated phenotypes and tried to identify loss-of-function mutations in some genes that involve in the process. One of the lines we found showed reduced pigmentation from the mature green stage of the fruit, and displayed pink coloration in the fully ripe stage. We've started to monitor the differences of gene expression level by oligonucleotide-based microarray that generated from whole tomato unigene and consists of over 41,000 probe sets.
