Science & Technology - Posted by Pat Bailey-UC Davis on Friday, June 29, 2012 10:21 - 1 Comment 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Tasty tomatoes may make a comeback
"Now that we know that some of the qualities that people value in heirloom tomatoes can be made available in other types of tomatoes, farmers can have access to more varieties of tomatoes that produce well and also have desirable color and flavor traits," says biochemist Ann Powell. (Credit: iStockphoto)
UC DAVIS/CORNELL (US) — Thanks to details from the tomato genome, plant scientists say regular tomatoes may soon taste more like heirloom varieties.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The finding, which is reported in the June 29 issue of the journal Science, has significant implications for the US tomato industry, which annually harvests more than 15 million tons of the fruit for processing and fresh-market sales.
“This information about the gene responsible for the trait in wild and traditional varieties provides a strategy to recapture quality characteristics that had been unknowingly bred out of modern cultivated tomatoes,” says Ann Powell, a biochemist in the University of California, Davis Department of Plant Sciences and one of the lead authors of the study.
“Now that we know that some of the qualities that people value in heirloom tomatoes can be made available in other types of tomatoes, farmers can have access to more varieties of tomatoes that produce well and also have desirable color and flavor traits,” she says.
For decades, plant breeders in the tomato industry have selected varieties that are uniformly light green before they ripen, in order to produce tomatoes that can be harvested at the same time.
However, this characteristic is accompanied by an unintended reduction in sugars that compromises the flavor of the fresh fruit and its desirability for processing.
Powell’s research team began studying the genes influencing tomato fruit development and ripening after spending two summers screening tomato plants for transcription factors that might play a role in both fruit color and quality.
Transcription factors are proteins that regulate genes, or turn them on and off. These factors themselves are manufactured or expressed by genes.
The researchers were particularly interested in tomatoes they observed in the field that were unusually dark green before they ripened.
Partnering with researchers at Cornell University and in Spain, who were mapping regions of the tomato genome, the scientists discovered two transcription factors, called GLK1 and GLK2, that control the development of chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are the structures in the plant cells that enable plants to photosynthesize, converting the energy of sunlight into sugars and other compounds that influence flavor and color.
The researchers scoured a collection of mutant and wild species of tomatoes established at UC Davis by the late Professor Charles Rick beginning in the 1950s. They discovered that dark green tomatoes that naturally express GLK2 produced ripe fruit with increased levels of sugars or soluble solids, important for processing tomatoes, as well as higher levels of the health-promoting compound lycopene.
“Nature presents numerous important genes and their variants, like uniform ripening, that breeders employ to facilitate the needs of growers, processors, and consumers,” says Jim Giovannoni, a USDA plant molecular biologist with the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University.
“Understanding the genes responsible for these characteristics facilitates the challenging process of breeding crops that meet the needs of all components of the food-supply chain.”
Cuong Nguyen, a Cornell graduate student in Giovannoni’s laboratory co-authored the paper with Powell. Other members of the research team included investigators at UC Davis, the USDA, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, and Universidad de Málaga.
The University of California Discovery program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, the National Science Foundation, the Viet Nam Education Foundation, the Fundación Genoma España, and the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, and the Instituto Tecnólogico de Costa Rica funded the study.
More news from UC Davis: http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/
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They discovered that dark green tomatoes that naturally express GLK2 produced ripe fruit with increased levels of sugars or soluble solids, important for processing tomatoes, as well as higher levels of the health-promoting compound lycopene
BUT THE ONES THAT WE GROW NOW HAVE REDUCED LEVELS OF NUTRIENTS INCLUDING LYCOPENE. IS IT TRUE THAT ALMOST ALL OF THE COMMERCIALLY VIABLE PRODUCE HAS BEEN MODIFIED? PERHAPS LACKING IN NUTRIENTS OUR BODIES NEED? OUR BODIES KNOW THIS, SO IT EATS MORE, TRYING TO MAKE UP FOR THE LACK OF THESE NUTRIENTS. OVER EATING, COMPENSATING FOR WHAT WE ARE LACKING, CAUSED BY MANIPULATION OF GREEDY GROWERS.=OBESITY. MY ANIMALS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN WHEN THEY WERE LACKING PROPER NUTRIENTS IE; EATING DIFFERENT PLANTS, DIGGING IN EARTH TO INGEST CERTAIN SALTS AND MINERALS ETC. SO DON’T TELL ME THAT OUR BODIES DON’T DO THE SAME. HOMEGROWN TASTE BETTER FOR A REASON. IT HAS ALL THE THINGS GOD MEANT TO BE IN THE FOOD. REVERSE THE DAMAGE BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.