Thousands of years ago, people in South America began domesticating Solanum pimpinellifolium, a weedy plant with small, intensely flavored fruit.
Thousands of years ago, people in South America began domesticating Solanum pimpinellifolium, a weedy plant with small, intensely flavored fruit. Over time, the plant evolved into S. lycopersicum – the modern cultivated tomato.
Although today’s tomatoes are larger and easier to farm compared with their wild ancestor, they also are less resistant to disease and environmental stresses like drought and salty soil.
Researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute, led by Zhangjun Fei, created a high-quality reference genome for S. pimpinellifolium and discovered sections of the genome that underlie fruit flavor, size and ripening, stress tolerance and disease resistance. The results were published in Nature Communications on November 16.
“This reference genome will allow researchers and plant breeders to improve traits like fruit quality and stress tolerance in the tomato,” said Fei, “for example, by helping them discover new genes in the modern tomato as well as by reintroducing genes from S. pimpinellifolium that were lost over time as S. lycopersicum was domesticated.”
Read more at: Boyce Thompson Institute
The fruits of Solanum pimpinellifolium, the wild ancestor of modern cultivated tomatoes, are about the size of blueberries. (Photo Credit: Scott Peacock and the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center.)
