Blue Tomato Precursors

[Tom Wagner]

Blue tomatoes are a mixed lot..... containing snippets of several wild species... Chessmanii, Lycopersicoides, and Chilense added to Lycopersicum.


[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/F6bHskj.png?1[/IMG]

along with such commercial tomatoes of questionable flavor...VF36 and a couple of unknown varieties...Vigoroz? and/or unknown. There has got to be some genetic drag leading to less flavor than we would like.

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/sqmYobo.png?1[/IMG]

How did it get started?

Tomato seed lines LA1996 (Aft), LA0791{atv), LA331 l{ogc), LA3532(>),
LA2374CB), LA3183(0, and LA2996a(JDe/) were acquired from the C.M.Rick
Tomato Resource Center, University of California, Davis, CA. LA 1996 was
crossed to LA0797. F3 seed were produced from this line in the greenhouse in the
winter of 2002-2003, as well as increased seed lots of the other lines.

I am growing the ancestor lines to Indigo Rose..LA1996, and LA0791 and the Abg line to better understand the breeding work done earlier. Breeding the old lines together and also with the advanced progenies will give me some idea what went on and what to improve by using better flavored lines of quite complicated backgrounds.
There is more to the story but the following will give you some idea of the genesis for a blue tomato....
http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...ient=firefox-a
Breeding Tomatoes for Improved Antioxidant Activity
by
Peter J. Mes
2004

While purple tomatoes are not likely to hit the market in the immediate
future, the continued marketing of 'high antioxidant' fruits and vegetables will
very likely prepare a niche market for such a novelty crop. The anthocyanidins
responsible for the purple color have been reported to have antioxidant activity in
previous reports. Testing of the various genetic combinations of tomato fruit
anthocyanin-expression genes revealed a trend of increased antioxidant capacity
with increasing purple color intensity. The increase in anthocyanins was found to
correlate to an increase in total phenolic content. Phenolics, known for their
antioxidant activity, may be beneficial for human consumption, and also have
antioxidant activity. The trend of increased phenolics and anthocyanins may be
exploited by breeders by using the anthocyanin-expression-enhancing genes and
other genes influencing the flavonoid pathway to produce tomatoes with elevated
phenolic content, resulting in increased water soluble antioxidant content in tomato
fruit skin. The combination of the flavonoid altering genes Aft, atv, and hp-1
together with the high lycopene gene ogc will further increase the antioxidant
content of the tomato, elevating ascorbic acid, a-tocopherol, carotenoid, and
phenolic content. Such a tomato with be a truly 'high antioxidant' fruit, boasting
high levels of both water and lipid soluble antioxidants.

The immediate future is here. Breeder/Vendor folks like myself have made great inroads to get even higher antocyanin content in blue tomatoes. I have hybrids with the Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge which has peruvianum genes to go along with the chessmanii, lycopersicoides and chilense species.

We believe that the high-flavonoid purple portion of the
tomato skin inhibited microbial growth.

This is part of the fun work with blue tomatoes....testing the hypothesis that blue tomatoes are valuable in several ways including sun scald resistance. Adding the rin gene to blue tomatoes to get extended shelf life may be a way to retest the ability of blue tomatoes to resist rot. That I am going to the field today to cross my rin lines to many kinds of blues shows that I am taking this kind of research seriously.

Since I am a breeder of blue potatoes and blue corn....I am fascinated by observations such as blue potatoes having a microbial resistance in the tubers.

Sorry about my disjointed writing style ....I am biting at the bit to get out to the field to add to my already 250 crosses made. String tags everywhere!