Researchers at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and Environment at Israel’s Hebrew University and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York have achieved increased yields and improved taste in hybrid tomato plants. The researchers discovered the yield-boosting power of a single gene, which controls the timing determining when plants make flowers. The technology works in different varieties of tomato and across a range of environmental conditions. The discovery was patented by Yissum, the TTO for Hebrew-U, which is seeking potential partners for further development and commercialization. “This discovery has tremendous potential to transform both the billion-dollar tomato industry as well as agricultural practices designed to get the most yield from other flowering crops,” says Zach Lippman, PhD, assistant professor in CSHL’s Watson School of Biological Sciences and co-author of a paper describing the technology that appears in Nature Genetics.
Lippman and colleagues made the discovery while hunting for genes that boost hybrid vigor, a breeding principle that spurred the production of hybrid crops like corn and rice a century ago. Hybrid vigor, also known as heterosis, is the phenomenon by which intercrossing two varieties of plants produces more vigorous hybrid offspring with higher yields. A theory for heterosis, supported by the Hebrew-U-Cold Spring discovery, postulates that improved vigor stems from only a single gene — an effect called “superdominance” or “overdominance.” The research team developed a novel approach to find such genes by turning to a tomato “mutant library” — a collection of 5,000 plants, each of which has a single mutation in a single gene that causes defects in various aspects of tomato growth, such as fruit size, leaf shape, etc. Selecting 33 mutant plants, most of which produced low yield, the team crossed each mutant with its normal counterpart and searched for hybrids with improved yield. The most dramatic example increased yield by 60%. The scientists are seeking to team up with agricultural companies to develop the hybrids for commercial use.
Source: ScienceBlog