First, since I didn’t explicitly state it in my previous post, the paper on the longer lasting tomatoes developed by India’s National Institute for Plant Genome Research didn’t report any data on how the RNAi knock-down tomatoes actually taste.* The tomatoes are nearly twice as firm as tomatoes in which these genes are NOT knocked [...]
Posts Tagged ‘tomato’
Scientists at India’s NIPGR Create a Longer-Lasting Tomato (Studying The Regulation of Fruit Ripening)
Author’s note: This would seem to be the week for vegetables I hated as a kid. Yesterday was onion, today tomato, if there’s a story about brinjal/eggplant in the next few days we’ll have hit all the big ones.
I was recently pointed to an early publication paper that went up on the Proceedings [...]
Could we feed ourselves with tomatoes?
Obviously no one is suggesting turning the US into a tomato monoculture, but tomatoes seem like a easy, if not necessarily accurate, proxy for the sort of fresh vegetable passed diets that some people advocate as a solution for the entire nation. If the did the same calculation for lettuce, the numbers would likely be [...]
Domestication Bottlenecks
Why modern tomatoes are more genetically diverse than heirlooms. Domestication, population bottlenecks, and why tasmanian devils are dying of a transmissible cancer.
The Real GM Tomato
In my previous post I mentioned that the only people who actually knew what GM tomatoes tasted like where a few who’d lived in California in the mid-90s. That was when Calgene, a biotech start-up founded in the university town of UC-Davis, introduced a tomato that would last longer without tasting like cardboard. And the [...]