Assessment of Greenhouse Tomato Anthesis Rate Through Metabolomics Using LASSO Regularized Linear Regression Model.

Abstract

While the high year-round production of tomatoes has been facilitated by solar greenhouse cultivation, these yields readily fluctuate in response to changing environmental conditions. Mathematic modeling has been applied to forecast phenotypes of tomatoes using environmental measurements (e.g., temperature) as indirect parameters. In this study, metabolome data, as direct parameters reflecting plant internal status, were used to construct a predictive model of the anthesis rate of greenhouse tomatoes. Metabolome data were obtained from tomato leaves and used as variables for linear regression with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) for prediction. The constructed model accurately predicted the anthesis rate, with an R 2 value of 0.85. Twenty-nine of the 161 metabolites were selected as candidate markers. The selected metabolites were further validated for their association with anthesis rates using the different metabolome datasets. To assess the importance of the selected metabolites in cultivation, the relationships between the metabolites and cultivation conditions were analyzed via correspondence analysis. Trigonelline, whose content did not exhibit a diurnal rhythm, displayed major contributions to the cultivation, and is thus a potential metabolic marker for predicting the anthesis rate. This study demonstrates that machine learning can be applied to metabolome data to identify metabolites indicative of agricultural traits.

Plant phenotyping relevance

トマトの開花率という植物形質をメタボロームデータから予測するLASSOモデルを構築し、別データセットで検証しており、形質推定手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's tomato leaf metabolome dataset (DM0041) used for the LASSO anthesis-rate modeling is publicly deposited in DROP Met at PRIMe, with an explicit Data Availability Statement and URL. No author analysis code or trained model checkpoint is stated as publicly available; the supplementary material link is generic.