[Fred Hempel]

3 years ago we grew all of our breeding lines in Southern Baja for the first time, in the open field. It happened to be a year when hordes of white flies descended onto all tomatoes and peppers in the region, inoculating each and every plant hundreds, if not thousands, of times with TYLCV.

70% of our plants were severely stunted. 20% were markedly stunted and 10% showed little or no stunting (even though yellow spots on the leaves indicated sites of inoculation on every plant). In some ways, it was a great season, even though we lost most of our plants. We had a very hard selection for TYLCV resistance that has translated to TMV and Tomato Spotted Wilt resistance as well.

Honestly, we feel fortunate that we had a nice number of lines that showed resistance (10% is arguably alot, could have been worse).

Most of the new hybrid lines we are developing should show virus resistance, but we still need to really challenge them one more time during a high white fly year to see which lines retain significant resistance.

So, you may want to keep an eye out for our new varieties (Artisan Seeds) in the future.

In a side note, Orange Jazz, Jazz, and most of our released lines were completely hammered by virus that year. Some seem to be even extra susceptible. Purple Bumblebee seemed to be very virus resistant, and our other Bumblebee varieties showed pretty good resistance that year. The "tigers" including Blush, were susceptible.

One last thing, since we are using strong field selections to determine resistance (in the absence of the analysis of molecular markers) we will never be able to "claim" resistance. But, we think field selection is more valuable, as finding the gene-for-gene resistances that make for simple academic (and publishable) stories may not be as important as the potentially genetically messy (but effective) resistance that we select for in the field -- including resistance that is not pathogen specific. In the end, we think that people will learn about our resistance lines, even if the resistance of the line is not denoted with a letter in a catalog.