SUMMARY OF SOLANACEAE COORDINATING MEETINGS

A Solanaceae coordinated agricultural project (SolCAP) planning meeting was held during the VI^th International Solanaceae Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, 2006, in order to organize a community of researchers for “translational genomics,” the field of adapting information derived from genome technologies for crop improvement. This meeting continued a planning process that was initiated during the 2005 American Society of Horticultural Sciences workshop, “Translational Genomics of Vegetable Crops,” and continued at the University of California, Davis, in November 2005 and the Plant and Animal Genome Conference in January 2006. The goal of these meetings has been to create an inclusive community of applied and basic, private and public researchers with participation from commodity groups, growers and end users focused on leveraging genome resources for improvement of solanaceous crops. The SolCAP meeting participants—breeders, genomics scientists, commodity stakeholder groups and end users—felt that focusing the meeting on both fresh and processed commodities from the three major solanaceous vegetable crops (potato, pepper and tomato) would offer both breadth and challenge. Priorities were systematically defined for traits and tools that would benefit more than one commodity in the Solanaceae. A consensus from the community was to emphasize candidate gene approaches that are low risk, high priority, high impact and cross-commodity. The meeting participants defined clear goals for traits: 1) detailed investigation of the carbohydrate/sugar metabolism pathways and 2) increasing the levels and/or bioavailability of ascorbic acid/Vitamin C. A roundtable discussion on tools developed an extensive list and gave high priority to the following: 1) need for a centralized phenotyping facility and database; 2) access to genotyping platforms; 3) breeder-friendly analysis tools and centralized database for markers; 4) markers useful in breeding germplasm; and 5) development of standard genotyping panels. A committee was formed to take a lead in each of the topic areas. Information on SolCAP can be found at http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/ tomato/SOLCAP.htm.