It's going to be a complete game changer for, for horticultural crops. Amazingly important.
It's a huge step forward. It's a blueprint for the rest of how we're going to carry out
science in the future.
I am sure that most people are familiar with this type of tomato, which you see in bins
in supermarkets. And this one is, travels very well, it's sort of resistant to spoilage,
but it doesn't actually, often doesn't taste very nice, it just lasts a long time. And
what we really want is, is we want tomatoes which are like this, which are very, very
red, very, very tasty. But normal tomato fruit, and of course many other fruit, are very,
very perishable products. So what we have actually done is to sequence the genetic code
of tomato. And the reason why that's important is because tomatoes are one of the most important
fruit crops in the world. In fact, the tomato crop worldwide, both sort of fresh and processed
material, is worth about, I think it's estimated about thirty or forty billion dollars a year.
And tomatoes provide a huge number of important vitamins and minerals and other sorts of plant
chemicals that promote health in the human diet. That's basically because we eat a lot
of tomatoes. Not just the fresh ones, but we eat tomato sauce, and tomatoes on pizza
toppings and so on and so forth. So human beings eat a lot of tomato products. And so,
knowing the genetic code is a way we can have a rational approach to breeding better quality
tomatoes, and also tomatoes that maybe can resist drought more effectively, if they're
grown out in the field, or have a better fruit quality, because after all that's the part
of the crop that we eat, and maybe have fruit that perhaps will last longer but taste a
lot better, and actually contain more of the important bioactives, which we know protect
people against cancer and heart disease.
There's a whole international community, that came together to sequence the tomato genome.
One of the great benefits of having the genome sequence is that we can start to pull in genes
from wild species of tomato that are more well adapted to live in dry, desert conditions.
The tomato originally comes from Peru and some of the wild species that are available
in some of the deserts in Peru, we can then start to breed in those traits more, more,
more quickly and more exactly by looking at the gene sequences that are present in the
crosses that we make.
Because we, we've, we can now read the tomato book, as it were, we can see where all the
genes are, which chromosomes they're on, and the, and the gene order as well, we can now
begin to associate particular genes with characteristics such as fruit firmness, or taste and so on
and so forth. We can actually identify the genes that are responsible and then you can
go to wild tomato species and find variants of those genes that may slow softening down
or enhance certain flavour characteristics. And you can use breeding, conventional breeding,
to breed those effects into the cultivated background. But because you know the gene
involved, you can use markers for that gene to speed up and make more precise the breeding process.
It'll hugely reduce waste, where fruit are just thrown away because they go off before
they can be eaten. And there's another twist to this actually, because tomatoes have long
been used as the model for understanding fruit ripening, and it turns out that the genes
that control tomato fruit ripening, similar genes are actually present in other types
of fruits. So what you might be surprised to know is that genes that control ripening
in tomato fruit, very similar genes actually control the ripening of other very different
fruit such as strawberries and bananas. So in the future, it should be possible to manipulate
ripening in strawberries and bananas as well. This is an important crop and we want to make
sure that more people are eating tomatoes, because of the health benefits, and other fruit.