Tomatoes are important crops, providing a flavoring to such things as sauces and sandwiches that few other fruits can. But they are not exactly staples like tubers, nuts, bananas, and grains on which national diets and caloric satisfaction can depend. Nonetheless, great excitement from several outlets greeted news this week that a mutant variant of the gene set that controls tomato flowering has been found, bred for, and revealed to exert powerful influence on yield and sweetness in several tomato varieties. Of some interest is that the work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island  and at Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem used no transgenic modification, but only classic cross-breeding of spontaneously formed genetic variations, to identify the potential for more bounteous tomato harvests.  (CORRECTED: yikes – I wrote Maine for Cold Spring lab’s locale in an earlier version of this post, brain skipping to the Jackson Lab down east.) That means a lot in Europe, where opposition to trans-species,  genetically modified organisms has in some quarters a near-religious fervor. It illustrates a somewhat non-rigorous but well-pedigreed term in agricultural science: hybrid vigor, noted by Charles Darwin among others, or formally heterosis. You can guess which of those three tomato plants is the vigorous hybrid. The news is in a report in Nature Genetics;

As conventional tomatoes are tasty enough, and as far as The Tracker knows there is no shortage of tomatoes or any chance that tomatoes will avert future famines, it is as first striking to see such exuberant reporting on this.

But at, for one example, The Independent in the UK, science editor Steve Connor zeroes in on one reason to get worked up:  “The discovery could be applied to other food crops such as potatoes, peppers, and aubergines, the geneticists hope.” Wait a moment while I look up aubergine. Ah – eggplant. Connor uses several quotes off the release without identifying them as something he didn’t hear himself – but also has some not on the CSHL handout. So it looks like he made a phone call.

Hmmm. Wonder if this variant gene set – in which one and just one of the mutant gene is matched with a normal one – can be bred into those Farmers’ market specials, odd-looking but flavorful heirloom tomatoes, without screwing them up.

Other stories:

• Reuters – Joanne Allen: Single gene powers hybrid tomato plants ;
• Daily Mail: Why the super tomato is a sweet success ; It’s because they are like mules, it says here. Tidy and reasonably useful story but quotes are all courtesy, unacknowledged, of the handout.
• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Key to sweeter tomatoes uncovered ; More press release quotes. The story reports that the better flavor and yield arose from “tweaking” the gene. Not sure if that verb works when the gene itself is not altered? The hybrid has just one copy, rather than the two of one of the first-generation cross’s parents. Is that a tweak, or a dilution? The story throws in unrelated news from France of the sequencing of a truffle gene.
• Newsday – Delthia Ricks: Cold Spring Harbor Lab creates sweeter tomatoes ; This site used to track Mzs. Ricks’s output regularly, but not since all but the first grafs of Newsday’s stories slipped behind a subscribers-only barrier. This one starts promisingly. I wonder if there’s a way to get selected stories to Tracker readers. Looks like time for a call to find out.
• Scotsman – John von Radowitz: Tomatoes to be tastier after experts discover a mutant gene ; Short piece, looks straight off the release ;

Grist for the Mill:

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Release ;  Nature Genetics journal abstract ;

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.