Exploration and statistical significance of the landscape of multiple agronomic properties of interest for tomato fruit applying local perturbations in its effective TRN.

<p>(A) Agronomic properties improved by perturbing a single gene as function of efficiency reached by that transcriptional perturbation with respect to the wild-type scenario; only perturbations causing positive mean efficiencies are plotted. Both agronomic properties and efficiencies of a single perturbation are tested on the 169 RILs and error bars represent their minimum and maximum values in both axis. (B) Relationship between agronomic properties in the wild-type genome and the average of the agronomic properties resulting of all single perturbations in the wild-type TRN for each RIL; vertical error bars represent the best and worst optimized re-engineered TRN for a given RIL. (C) Average number of single gene perturbations that overcome a given efficiency threshold in the 169 RILs (light bars; error bars represent standard deviation for the 169 RILs) and average probability of selecting the same gene-perturbation in a set of RILs (dark bars; error bars show standard deviation for all genes of the TRN). Left and right columns represent perturbations of single gene in case of knockout or over-expression, respectively. (A, B) show fitness as related to the acceptability of tomato fruit (blue) and production vs. quality (red); (C) and fitness values associated to maximize only fruit quality (green). Agronomic properties are plotted in arbitrary units.