Selection of Tomato Rich in Nutritional Terpenes

There is a rising concern about the nutritional and functional properties of food and its use to promote human health and prevent diseases. Considering the high level of consumption of tomato, this vegetable has become an ideal source of health promoting compounds. Among the terpenes, carotenoids have received most part of the attention. The terpenes lycopene and b-carotene have been related to decreased levels of certain heart diseases as well as certain types of cancer. Consequently, a high interest has been placed in the selection of lines with increased levels of these terpenes. The main difficulties in this process have relied on the necessity to separate genotypic effects on the trait from J. Cebolla-Cornejo • F. Nuez (*) Instituto Universitario de Conservacion y Mejora de la Agrodiversidad Valenciana (COMAV), Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain e-mail: jaicecor@btc.upv.es; fnuez@btc.upv.es S. Rosello Departamento de Ciencias Agrarias y del Medio Natural, Universitat Jaume I, Castellon, Spain K.G. Ramawat, J.M. Merillon (eds.), Natural Products, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-22144-6_127, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 2853 environmental or interaction effects. On the other hand, the availability of rapid and efficient methods to determine the content in these compounds has also limited progress in the area. Mutants identified in the cultivated species and wild relatives enable an improved accumulation of total carotenoids or a different distribution among them. Some of these mutants have been used in the development of new cultivars, but usually involve a decrease in yield. The modification of the biosynthetic pathway via genetic engineering has contributed to the dissection of these allelic variants, and to provide new approaches for the development of high carotenoid lines.