Over the years, tomatoes have been selectively bred for qualities such as size and firmness for shipping purposes and appearance, but selection for flavor has generally been overlooked. Many of us find that the tomatoes we buy in the grocery store just don’t taste like they used to. In fact, often they don’t taste like much of anything. Comparing them to the delicious local-grown varieties we can find during the summer provides evidence for this conclusion.
You would think that taste is a quality that farmers and consumers would want to maintain while breeding tomatoes, but the complex nature of flavor makes it difficult to detect the small changes produced by selective breeding over relatively short periods of time. Eventually, good flavor just drifted out of commercialized tomato varieties.
A new study published in the journal Science has determined which genes are needed to reinstate the rich, original flavor of tomatoes. Researchers studied 101 modern, heirloom and wild varieties of tomatoes and rated them with respect to intensity and quality of flavor. They sequenced the genomes of nearly 400 tomato varieties and ultimately identified 13 chemical compounds associated with flavor that were significantly reduced or lost entirely in modern tomato varieties. They then identified the corresponding genetic sequences or alleles that contribute to these compounds.
The next step is to use molecular markers combined with various traditional breeding methods to try to move the good alleles back into tomatoes. Bringing back delicious tomatoes will require collaboration across several disciplines including geneticists, biochemists, breeders and consumers. One bite into a good local summer tomato should convince you that it would be worth it.
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Researchers Work to Restore the Long-Lost Flavor of Tomatoes
Photo, posted April 25, 2008, courtesy of Vladimir Morozov via Flickr.
‘Restoring the Taste of Tomatoes’ from Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.