Posted on 06/30/2012 2:03:31 AM PDT by Racehorse
The mass-produced tomatoes we buy at the grocery store tend to taste more like cardboard than fruit. Now researchers have discovered one reason why: a genetic mutation, common in store-bought tomatoes, that reduces the amount of sugar and other tasty compounds in the fruit.
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But the new study, published this week in Science, found that the mutation that leads to the uniform appearance of most store-bought tomatoes has an unintended consequence: It disrupts the production of a protein responsible for the fruit's production of sugar.
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The study authors set out to pin down the genetic change that makes tomatoes lose their dark-green top. They focused their attention on two genes — GLK1 and GLK2 — both known to be crucial for harvesting energy from sunlight in plant leaves.
They found that GLK2 is active in fruit as well as leaves — but that in uniformly colored tomatoes, it is inactivated.
Adding back an active GLK2 gene to bland, commercial-style tomatoes through genetic engineering created tomatoes that had the heirloom-style dark-green hue. The darker green comes from greater numbers of structures called chloroplasts that harvest energy from sunlight.
The harvested energy is stored as starches, which are converted to sugars when the tomatoes ripen.
The vast majority — 70% to 80% — of the sugar in tomatoes travels to the fruit from the leaves of the plant. But the remaining amount of sugar is produced in the fruit. This contribution is largely wiped out in uniform, commercial-style tomatoes — and thus they won't be as sweet.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Thanks, I’ll do that.
Just had my first June tomato
Normally have to wait till mid July for tomato
Yes, you have to either eat or preserve them faster but is it really that hard to eat a tomato in a week?
tomato chips???....I’ve heard of sun dried tomatoes....tell me, do you remove the skins before you dry them?
they did the same thing to apples...
as a kid, I worked on an upstate NY apple orchard.....nothing better than a fresh MacIntosh or a McCoun or Cortland right off the tree...
here in the west, they consider the uniform red delicious to be the "best apple" when in reality, IMO they taste like cardboard...
No, skins and all. Cut them about 3/16 to 1/4” thick. Dehydrator on 135’F to keep as much nutrients and taste as possible in them.
Rotate shelves every couple hours so they dry even.
When they are finished you can almost see thru them
That's true love and home gown tomatoes
gown = grown
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