Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is the second most important vegetable crop globally, with a total world production valued at over $74 billion (FAOSTAT Statistics Database, 2009). Tomato is also an important model crop for fruit development and disease resistance. The Tomato Genome Consortium recently decoded the genomic information of a domesticated tomato cultivar, Heinz 1706 (Solanum lycopersicum), as well as the wild tomato species LA1589 (Solanum pimpinellifolium) (Tomato Genome, 2012). The tomato genome encodes approximately 35 000 protein-coding genes, but the function of many of these remains unknown.

West Lafayette, Indiana ii I dedicate this thesis to my goddaughter, Erinayo Obadina.iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Summary 24The soilborne pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum is the causal agent of bacterial wilt, and causes

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The importance of evaluation and establishment during product development process, for the reliability and safety of mechanical system and parts, is getting increased in the field of mechanical and electronic industry. The object of this paper is to suggest the reliability assessment method for machine tools using failure mode analysis and to introduce two web-based analysis programs which save all data related to failure rate, failure mode, and failure component. In order to evaluate the reliability of machine tools, this paper takes three steps: the use of previous database, the failure rate estimation using failure history data, and the failure mode analysis using performance test.