Identification of metabolites involved in heat stress response in different tomato genotypes

Tomato production is threatened by climate change. High temperatures lead to a decrease of fruit set which correlates with a decrease of pollen fertility. The low viability of tomato pollen under heat stress was previously shown to be associated with alterations in specific metabolites. In this thesis, we used untargeted metabolomics approaches to broaden the identification of metabolites affected by heat stress. We assessed the suitability of pollen isolation methods for metabolomics analysis and considered the pitfalls for our further analysis. We explored the developmental metabolomes of pollen and anthers of different tomato genotypes under control and high temperature conditions and identified that microsporogenesis is a critical developmental stage for the production of mature and fertile pollen grain under heat stress. Several metabolites were putatively associated with tolerance to high temperature such as specific flavonoids, polyamines and alkaloids. These metabolites can be further used as markers in breeding programs to develop new genotypes tolerant to high temperatures.