Abstract

Tomato is known to contain nutritional components with several types of health-promoting actions. Lycopene which is an antioxidant present in tomatoes has been identified as being responsible for the beneficial effect of tomatoes. With the aim of increasing the antioxidants contents of tomato, two dark fruited single recessive mutants were crossed to produce double mutant with higher antioxidants contents. The high pigment (hp) mutant of tomato characterized by dark green fruits, when it is immature and deep red mature fruit which is a monogenic mutant of tomato, was crossed with atroviolacea (atv) monogenic non-allelic mutant which had the same phenotype. Although it was easy to distinguish the hpatv segregating double mutant in the f2 generation, the conformation of the hpatv double mutant was made genetically. The double mutant showed darker phenotype in stem, leaves,and much darker fruits due to higher pigments content. The double mutant qualitatively showed higher pigments content which is of great nutritional value the detailed estimation of the quantitative differences in pigments of the wild type, singlemutants and constructed mutant is recommended.