Diallel Analysis for Lycopene Content in the Hybrids Derived from Different Colored Parents in Tomato

Lycopene is a red pigment in tomato with purported antioxidant properties. As the amount of lycopene has been reported to differ in different colored tomatoes or even absent in non-red tomatoes, the objective of this study was to investigate the inheritance of lycopene content and the color parameters of hybrids using a 10 parent diallel excluding reciprocals. Parents differed in general combining ability (GCA) for lycopene and color parameters. “Chocolate Stripe” (purple and brown striped) had the highest lycopene content followed by NC 1CS (red colored with the crimson gene) with the best general combining ability among parental lines. Hybrids differed in lycopene content and color parameters across two summer and greenhouse experiments, with no interaction between experiments indicating that the lycopene content was consistent. Narrow-sense heritability for lycopene was only 9% whereas broad-sense heritability was estimated to be 25%. The order of dominance for lycopene content was found as purple-brown > red > blue > yellow > green. Heritability estimates for color parameters were close to those for lycopene. This information may be useful in developing specialty type tomatoes or increasing lycopene content in tomatoes.