Title : Tomato cell wall mutants and ripening 1 2 Characterisation of CRISPR mutants targeting genes modulating 3 pectin degradation in ripening tomato . 4 5

5 Duoduo Wang a , Nurul H. Samsulrizal b , Cheng Yan C , Natalie S. Allcock d , Jim 6 Craigon a , Barbara Blanco-Ulate e , Isabel Ortega-Salazar, e Susan E. Marcus f , Hassan 7 Moeiniyan Bagheri a , Laura Perez-Fons g , Paul D. Fraser g , Timothy Foster a , Rupert 8 Fray a , J. Paul Knox f and Graham B. Seymour a * 9 10 a School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, Loughborough, LEICS. 11 LE12 5RD, UK. 12 b Department of Plant Science, Kulliyyah of Science, International Islamic University 13 Malaysia. 14 c Institution of Vegetable Research, Shanxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 79 Longcheng 15 Street, Xiaodian District, Taiyuan City, Shanxi Province, China 030031. 16 d Electron Microscopy Facility, Centre for Core Biotechnology Services, University of 17 Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK 18 19 e Plant Sciences Department, University of California, Davis, California, 95616, USA. 20 21 f Centre for Plant Sciences, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 22 9JT, UK 23 g School of Biological Sciences, Plant Molecular Sciences, Centre for Systems and Synthetic 24 Biology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK 25 26 ORCID IDs: 0000-0001-8365-4947 (G.B.S) 0000-0002-9231-6891 (J.P.K) 27 *Corresponding author: graham.seymour@nottingham.ac.uk (Graham B. Seymour) 28 29 One-sentence summary: Comparative analysis of tomato cell wall mutants indicates only 30 pectate lyase has a major impact on fruit softening, but other enzymes play an important role 31 in coordinating cell wall disassembly. 32 33 Plant Physiology Preview. Published on November 20, 2018, as DOI:10.1104/pp.18.01187