Solanaceae around the World: TomGEM presented at SOL2019 conference

From 15^th-19^th September 2019 the beautiful city of Jerusalem (Israel) hosted the XVI Solanaceae Conference (SOL 2019) #sol2019. As in the past meetings, SOL 2019 brought together leading scientists, students and plant breeders in a friendly atmosphere for sharing knowledge, expertise and vision of international collaboration.

The meeting explored advances in the breeding and physiology of Solanaceae crops with a focus on health, nutrition and yield. Cutting edge tools for linking genomes and phenotypes were explored and the conference also aimed to develop together a road map for the next International SOL project (SOLII).

Among the leading SOL experts, the TomGEM consortium was widely represented and the project’s results were shown to the audience:

• TomGEM coordinator Mondher Bouzayen described the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of fruit ripening and the effect of environmental perturbation,
• Saleh Alseekh and Alisdair Fernie of the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam (Germany) presented the topic “Functional metabolomics in tomato and other species”,
• Cathie Martin of the John Innes Centre gave a talk on “Improving our health and well‐being with high quality Solanaceous Foods”,
• Antonio Granell (CSIC-UPV) presented the topic “Breadth, depth, and elasticity of the tomato health and flavour composition space”.