Impact of polyploidy on tomato productivity and fruit quality attributes under abiotic stress.

The project aims to induce tri and tetra ploidy lines for three elite tomato cultivars collected from Ethiopia and study their performance under no or abiotic stress conditions namely drought and salinity. The influence of increased ploidy will be evaluated by assessing the difference in morphological characteristics and fruit quality parameters between the generated polyploidy lines and their corresponding diploid parents. Besides, we will study the difference in physiological activities, biochemical compounds, and gene expression profiles between polyploidy lines and respective diploid parents under abiotic stress. Furthermore, targeted gene modulation and mutagenesis will be conducted for the selected genes and transcription factors using Agrobacterium transformation and CRISPR Cas9 genome editing techniques to study their role in ploidy-dependent abiotic stress tolerance. The best ploidy lines that perform better under stress or no stress conditions will be selected.