Emmanuel Omondi

INTRODUCTION Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) is, with potato, tomato, and pepper, one of the four most cultivated Solanaceous food crops, with a worldwide production exceeding 58.6 M tons in 2021 (FAO, 2022). About 17 700 eggplant accessions are currently listed in the Genesys worldwide catalog (https://www.genesys-pgr.org/) and maintained by dozens of genebanks.

Abstract Eggplant (Solanum melongena) is one of the four most important Solanaceous crops, widely cultivated and consumed in Asia, the Mediterranean basin, and Southeast Europe. We studied the Genome-wide association (GWA) of historical genebank phenotypic data on a genotyped worldwide collection of 3,449 eggplant accessions. Overall, 334 significant associations for key agronomic traits were detected.

1 INTRODUCTION Crop wild relatives possess traits of interest for breeding climate-resilient varieties because many are adapted to marginal environments (Kapazoglou et al., 2023). However, it is not often clear what specific adaptive traits they possess and to which abiotic stresses they are adapted (Rellstab et al., 2015), and linkage drag with undesirable traits makes it difficult to detect them (Chitwood-Brown et al., 2021; Huang et al., 2023).