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How the evolution of tomatoes left them vulnerable to pests

The wild tomato was once a small, hairy, green fruit. Unattractive, not only to humans but also to insects. The thick layer of hair kept insects and other pests at bay through both its smell and toxic substances.

After years of breeding, crossbreeding, and selecting plants with the desired characteristics, the tomato looks like we know it from the supermarket: red, large and, thanks to decades of breeding, stripped of its hairy coat. This also makes it more susceptible to insects and other pests. Worldwide, almost 30% of plant crops are lost to pests. Breeders and researchers, therefore, want to know how we can make tomatoes unattractive to insects again without sacrificing all the newly acquired characteristics.

To answer this question, Petra Bleeker, associate professor of plant physiology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), started a postdoc at the UvA some twenty years ago. She investigated which scent wild tomato plants use to keep insects at bay. She introduced the genetic material responsible for this into cultivated tomatoes. "It worked, but the cultivated tomato produced too little of the scent to be truly repellent," Bleeker explains in her office at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS).

So Bleeker continued to investigate how tomato plants spread this scent: where were the bottlenecks? Was the scent not being produced in sufficient quantities in the plant, or was it not being transported to the outside?

Read more at Folia