You Say Tomato, These Scientists Say Evolutionary Mystery
Published:01 Apr.2024 Source:University of Massachusetts Amherst
“Have you ever held a fresh tomato in your hand and wondered why it looks good, smells good and tastes delicious?” asks Jacob Barnett, graduate student in organismic and evolutionary biology at UMass Amherst and the papers’ lead author. It turns out that the juicy, red tomatoes with their unique flavor have a long and circuitous evolutionary history.
Barnett and his co-authors, including Ana Caicedo, professor of biology at UMass Amherst, turned to the relatives of our modern tomatoes, a group of several wild species growing in the western coast of South America, from Chile to Ecuador, to explore this question. And those wild species are nothing like what you’d find in your sandwich or salad today.
It turns out that fruits in the wild tend to have sets of traits that occur together, which biologists call syndromes. For example, many fruits are small, brightly colored and high in sugar. But evidence of evolutionary syndromes in wild tomatoes has been hard to gather, because no previous researchers had grown all the species of wild tomatoes together at the same time.