May 31, 2012

Tomato genome gets fully sequenced — paves way to healthier fruits, veggies

For the first time, the genome of the tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, has been decoded, an important step toward improving yield, nutrition, disease resistance, taste and color of the tomato and other crops.

The full genome sequence, as well as the sequence of a wild relative (Solanum pimpinellifolium), is published in the May 31 issue of the journal Nature. Specifically, the genome was sequenced from the “Heinz 1706” tomato.

The publication caps years of work by members of the Tomato Genomics Consortium, an international collaboration including Argentina, Belgium, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States.

Consortium researchers report that tomatoes possess some 35,000 genes arranged on 12 chromosomes. “For any characteristic of the tomato, whether it’s taste, natural pest resistance or nutritional content, we’ve captured virtually all those genes,” said James Giovannoni, a scientist at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI, which located on the Cornell campus) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) who leads the U.S. tomato sequencing team, which includes researchers at nine universities, the USDA and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where the wild tomato genome sequence was developed. Cornell University

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