Study of spontaneous mutagenesis in the breeding of tomato

Inherited variability of plants is associated with mutations. They lead to changes in the structure of genes, their number, sequence of location, structure of chromosomes, their number and number of haploid sets. This in turn leads to the variability of biological, morphological, biochemical and other traits of plants and other organisms. Spontaneous mutations tend to occur at a low frequency. Therefore, researchers use induced mutagenesis, which significantly increases the frequency of mutations. Comparison of spontaneous and induced mutants shows that in induced mutagenesis there is a severe impact of mutagenic factors on the genotype, which leads to a significant imbalance of the genome and its long-term genetic variability. The applied γ- irradiation of tomato seeds made it possible to detect up to 3% of plants with useful traits, but they could not be fixed in the progeny. Despite numerous attempts to create varieties by the method of induced mutagenesis, their number is very small, and productive breeders, as a rule, do not use the method of inducing hereditary changes, which can be observed from the publications of the last 10-15 conferences and meetings on vegetable and melon growing (2000-2016)...