New challenges for durable resistance breeding in tomato

This paper describes part of the recent developments in resistance breeding research and how this may influence breeding programs, with special emphasis on tomato. The major part of the euchromatic regions on the tomato genome, comprising more than 90% of all tomato genes, is being sequenced. This will give a new boost in our knowledge of the genetic organization of genes on the tomato genome. The sequences provide the possibility of generating large-scale marker data sets that facilitate marker-assisted breeding. In the long run, the function of more and more genes will become known, though this will still require very laborious basic lab work. In any case, tomato breeding is moving from mere plant phenotypic analysis towards the combination of genotyping and phenotyping techniques strongly supported by bio-informatics and statistics. We expect that this will have a major impact in tomato breeding for the next century.