Canalization of Tomato Fruit Metabolism.

To explore the genetic robustness (canalization) of metabolism, we examined the levels of fruit metabolites in multiple harvests of a tomato introgression line (IL) population. The IL partitions the whole genome of the wild species in the background of the cultivated tomato (). We identified several metabolite quantitative trait loci that reduce variability for both primary and secondary metabolites, which we named canalization metabolite quantitative trait loci (cmQTL).