Eddie Gonzales Jr. – AncientPages.com – We all know that tomatoes are red. That's no news, but how did they become red, and why are they, not blue, purple, or any other color?
Researchers have discovered that a meteorite that crashed into the Earth 60 to 70 million years ago wiped out dinosaurs and gave us large, red tomatoes. This can be deduced from a tomato genome analysis.
Credit: Pixabay - hansbenn - Public Domain
Scientists who mapped the tomato genome have established that the genome of the original tomato plant suddenly tripled in size about 60 to 70 million years ago.
"Such a big genome expansion points to extremely stressful conditions," says René Klein Lankhorst, the Wageningen UR coordinator of the tomato genome research project.
"We suspect that the meteorite crash and the resulting solar eclipse had created conditions difficult for plants to survive.
A distant ancestor of the tomato plant then expanded its genome considerably to increase its chances of survival."
When conditions subsequently improved again, this ancestor of the tomato got rid of a lot of genetic ballast, but the genetic base for fruit formation had already been developed by then. The tomato fruit acquired its red color, and certain genes which produced toxins disappeared, says Klein Lankhorst.
In this way, the tomato differentiates itself from a family member, the potato, which has no edible fruits.
The plant researchers could "look back" very far into the past by comparing the tomato plant genome with family members in the nightshade and other plant families. And they had the advantage of having almost mapped all the 35 thousand genes of the tomato, which made even small changes noticeable.
Credit: Adobe Stock - warpaintcobra
For example, a comparison of the locally produced vegetable crop with the wild ancestor Solanum pimpinellifolium (probably brought to Europe by the Spanish) showed that the genome of the Dutch tomato differs by only 0.6 percent from that of its wild ancestor from the 15th century.
Incredibly, the genetic makeup of tomato plants worldwide can be traced to these ancestors, proving the link between the dinosaur extinction causing meteor and the common red fleshy fruits.
The study was published in Nature
Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. - AncientPages.com - MessageToEagle.com Staff
