Graduate Research Assistant West Virginia State University DUNBAR, West Virginia
Body of Abstract: The five domesticated capsicum species belongs to three genetic complexes namely annuum (C. annuum, C. frutescens, C. chinense), baccatum (C. baccatum, C. praetermissum, C. chacoense) and pubescens (C. pubescens) that vary widely in their fruit shapes. Tomato Analyzer (TA) is a free software designed to measure the specific size of objects from scanned images of longitudinal and latitudinal fruit sections and image resolution measured in dots per inch (dpi). It eliminates the subjective scoring of many fruits shape traits and is designed to perform quantitative measurements of fruit traits in a semiautomatic and high-throughput manner. The traits that are impossible to quantify manually can be measured easily with TA. It can measure 58 morphological traits and was initially developed to analyze tomato fruits to characterize germplasm collections and to understand the genetic basis of fruit traits. My research aims to use TA for characterizing fruit shapes across the cultivated complexes and perform GWAS using genomewide SNPs to validate common and unique association signals across the species.