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Crosstalk: Tomatoville Research and Development™ This sub-forum is called that
for a good reason. As one of the more senior plant breeders posting here on TVille, I sometimes relate what I am doing in real time. Increasing anthocyanin content in potatoes, corn and tomatoes has been a long term obsession for me.
Blue tomatoes are fairly popular with some gardeners. The OSU release of Indigo Rose in 2012 is evidence of that. I have released many blue tomato varieties over the last three seasons and I have many more in the works.
The Indigo Rose carries two major genes Aft and atv for blue pigments. The gene Abg was used but is not present in the Indigo Rose. I thought it important to revisit the pedigree of Indigo Rose and actually grow the accessions with each of the three genes bred from wild species introgressed into cultivated lines. I have in the field each of the original accessions used by OSU from the Tomato Genetics Research Center in Davis, CA. A quick blurb from five years ago states:
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Fruit with the genes Abg, Aft, and atv exhibit varying degrees of anthocyanin production in the epidermis, but not in the fruit pericarp. Fruit with these alleles in various combinations were analyzed to characterize the anthocyanidin profile, moieties, and total anthocyanin content. In general, combining atv with either Aft or Abg substantially increased anthocyanin production in the fruit. Over 23 different anthocyanins were detected, petunidin-3-(p-coumaryl)-rutinoside-5-glucoside being predominant.
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I thought it would be interesting to breed some of my more advance blue tomatoes with each of the above genes...Abg, Aft, and atv.
I live in a climate that doesn't afford much pollen production...the temps have been in the fifties and sixties with rain every day for a while...with humidities in the 90's all night and morning and gradually reaching 75% by mid-day. Monday I started the breeding work about one o'clock and tomorrow I will try about 11 in the morning.
I wanted to cross one clone to each of the Davis accessions and luck would have it I had a Aft/Aft, atv/atv/ wo/wo, gs/gs line called YAMALI BLUE. It was done!
If I get viable F-1 seed, I hope to grow out the hybrid in Hawaii later this summer and look at the F-2 population either/or there and here in the Seattle area. Yamali Blue is a name that my friend in France named within a selection of seed of Seattle's Blue Woolly Mammoth. The hybrid will be easy to detect...heterozygous for the woolly trait but the other traits will be followed closely. I hope to make other crosses in a myriad of ways ...maybe even to offer seed of several crosses and segregations later on.
Pollen shed is limited with the temps and humidities as they are. As I like to have company when I cross, I will try to keep my profanity to a minimum. I have a professional photographer visiting me tomorrow in the field near Woodinville. He is taking pictures of me for the University of Kansas Alumni Magazine. I hope he will share some nicely focused pix with me. Maybe if I am nice to him, I will have enough photos to make a Power Point Presentation of me crossing tomatoes.