Wild Tomatoes Still Hold the Flavor We Bred Away: New Map Shows Breeders Where to Look
hubie writes:
Modern tomatoes are a breeding success story. Generations of selection have made them bigger, firmer, more productive, and easier to ship. But that progress came at a cost. Domestication and breeding reduced much of the crop's genetic diversity, and flavor has proven stubbornly hard to breed back in.
Tomato's wild relatives still carry much of what was lost. Some pack their fruit with high levels of the red pigment lycopene, and some store sugar differently. Others, like Solanum pennellii and Solanum neorickii, never turn red at all. Breeders have long wanted to know which genetic controls produce these traits, and which ones are worth bringing back.
A new study by researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) offers a detailed map of those controls. The team compared how genes behave in cultivated tomato and three wild relatives, across different fruit tissues and stages of development and ripening. That let them pinpoint the genetic "dimmer switches" behind color, sweetness, bitterness, and aroma, giving breeders a list of targets for developing tastier, more nutritious tomatoes.
[...] "Wild tomatoes are an enormous reservoir of diversity for flavor, nutrition, and resilience, but bringing those traits into modern varieties can come at the expense of other traits that breeders have spent decades improving, like yield, fruit size, or shelf life. This can be countered with precise information on how the genes responsible for such traits are controlled," said Catala.
Think of each gene as a lamp. Some shine brightly, some glow faintly, and how bright they are shapes how a fruit grows, ripens, and tastes. Something can change a lamp's brightness in two ways.
One is through a dimmer built into the lamp itself. Scientists call this a cis effect: a change in the section of DNA sitting right next to the gene, which controls how strongly that one gene turns on. The other is through the building's wiring. That's a trans effect: a change somewhere else in the genome that alters the power supply, often affecting many genes at once.
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