Elsevier, Scientia Horticulturae, (164), p. 625-632, 2013
DOI: 10.1016/j.scienta.2013.10.028
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Detailed characterization of fruit shape in eggplant (Solanum melongena) is important for horticultur-ists and breeders. In fact, commercial varieties are classified according to their fruit shape. However,traditional morphological descriptors provide limited information on this complex attribute. Recently, asoftware tool (Tomato Analyzer) for the processing of scanned images of sections of tomato fruits has beendeveloped. Tomato Analyzer is adequate for phenomics studies of fruit shape, as it provides quantitativeand objective data for a large number of fruit morphology traits. We used Tomato Analyzer for evaluatingfruit shape in a collection of 21 accessions of eggplant from four varietal groups (Round, Listada de Gandía,Semi-long, and Long). For each accession we evaluated 20 fruits, for which we measured fruit weight,length, and width (manually), and 23 fruit shape parameters using the Tomato Analyzer. Significant dif-ferences among accessions have been found for all traits, except for Shoulders Height. For many traits,high values for the coefficient of genotypic variation (CVG) and broad-sense heritability (H2) have beenobtained, indicating that selection will be efficient. Significant differences have also been found amongvarietal groups for 20 out of the 26 traits, and for six of them each of the four varietal groups differedsignificantly from the others. Multivariate principal components analysis (PCA) shows that accessions ofeach of the four varietal groups plot together and in separate areas of the PCA graph, with the exceptionof some overlapping between Round and Listada de Gandía accessions. Discriminant analysis resulted in57.14% of the individual fruits being correctly assigned to their accession, and of those incorrectly classi-fied, 21.67% were correctly classified to their varietal group. The results obtained show that the TomatoAnalyzer image software tool is of great utility for phenomics studies of fruit shape in eggplant, which isof interest for characterization of germplasm and cultivars, and for selection and breeding.