A supermarket tomato can be a delicate thing, easily squashed. Tomatoes grown for canning are a lot tougher. Even when vine-ripened, they’re unscathed by huge harvesting machines that rip out plants row by row, shake loose the fruits, and fling them into trucks. Such durability makes these tomatoes cheap to farm, but they’re also a bit bland when eaten raw; cooks typically turn them into sauce.
Now, researchers have discovered the gene that gives canned tomatoes, typically the Roma variety, their durable shape. The finding, reported [September 18] in Nature Plants, could allow breeders to create tomato varieties that are delicious yet also strong enough to be harvested by machine.
For several years, Chuanyou Li, a plant geneticist at Shandong Agricultural University, has been working on a solution to this conundrum. In the new study, he and his colleagues decided to identify the gene that gives Roma tomatoes their rugged, egglike shape. Its approximate location was already known, but the gene itself had proved elusive.
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Next, Li and colleagues knocked out Solyc08g061910 with the gene-editing method CRISPR in a round tomato variety known as TB0249. This trick replicated the mutation found in Roma tomatoes. When the experimental plants matured and flowered, they had elongated fruit, just like Romas.
