A chemical genetic roadmap to improved tomato flavor
By D. Tieman, G. Zhu, Marcio F. R. Resende, Tao Lin, Cuong Nguyen, Dawn H Bies, J. Rambla, Kristty Stephanie Ortiz Beltran, M. Taylor, Bo Zhang and 10 more. Science, 2017
724 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Looking for lost flavor in tomatoes Commercially available tomatoes are renowned these days for sturdiness, but perhaps not for flavor. Heirloom varieties, on the other hand, maintain the richer flavors and sweeter tomatoes of years past. Tieman et al. combined tasting panels with chemical and genomic analyses of nearly 400 varieties of tomatoes. They identified some of the flavorful components that have been lost over time. Identification of the genes that have also gone missing provides a path forward for reinstating flavor to commercially grown tomatoes. Science, this issue p. 391 Genomic analysis shows what genes to put back to reinstate flavor in tomatoes. Modern commercial tomato varieties are substantially less flavorful than heirloom varieties. To understand and ultimately correct this deficiency, we quantified flavor-associated chemicals in 398 modern, heirloom, and wild accessions. A subset of these accessions was evaluated in consumer panels, identifying the chemicals that made the most important contributions to flavor and consumer liking. We found that modern commercial varieties contain significantly lower amounts of many of these important flavor chemicals than older varieties. Whole-genome sequencing and a genome-wide association study permitted identification of genetic loci that affect most of the target flavor chemicals, including sugars, acids, and volatiles. Together, these results provide an understanding of the flavor deficiencies in modern commercial varieties and the information necessary for the recovery of good flavor through molecular breeding.
Subfields: Genetics, Nutrition and Dietetics, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ae9678385105dd7155a039db3cfaaace3e229e7
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In Genetics
- T. Ranallo-Benavidez
- Fritz J. Sedlazeck
- Esther van der Knaap
- Z. Lippman
- Lauren J. Brzozowski
- Michael Mazourek
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- A Sustainable Agricultural Future Relies on the Transition to Organic Agroecological Pest Management (2018, background): “While heirloom crops may be a reservoir of flavor [59], they have, by definition, not been improved with recent advances for yield or yield stability traits like pest and disease resistance.”
- Major impacts of widespread structural variation on gene expression and crop improvement in tomato (2020, methodology): “wide association study (GWAS), but only a few have been functionally characterized (Tieman et al., 2017; Zhu et al., 2018).”
- Rewiring of the Fruit Metabolome in Tomato Breeding. (2018, background): “Previously, using consumer taste panels and targeted metabolomics (Tieman et al., 2017), we identified 34 metabolites that are significantly correlated with consumer preference (p 0.05).”