MicroTom is a tomato cultivar and is currently a widely applied experimental model plant for laboratory studies due to its smaller size, shorter growth cycle, and higher transformation efficiency.
Despite the extensive re-sequencing of numerous tomato cultivars, a high-quality genome for MicroTom has been conspicuously absent, presenting a challenge for developmental biologists who rely on the Heinz tomato genome for reference but use MicroTom for functional experiments.
In July 2023, Horticulture Research published a research article titled "Comprehensive regulatory networks for tomato organ development based on the genome and RNAome of MicroTom tomato." In this study, researchers provided a high-quality genome of MicroTom and conducted comparative genomic analysis with the previously published Heinz tomato genome.