For some time now, we have all noticed it. Tomatoes (the highest value vegetable grown in the world), in most of their commercial varieties, do not taste like tomatoes. For what reason? A study carried out by an international team of scientists, including Spanish researchers from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Plant Biology , a joint center of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Polytechnic University of Valencia , have discovered that today’s tomatoes possess fewer amounts of the chemical compounds that give traditional tomatoes their characteristic sweetness.
The experts conducted a genetic and chemical study on tomatoes, quantifying the taste of chemical compounds in 398 varieties of traditional, modern and wild tomatoes in order to identify the chemical compounds that contributed the most to the flavor and taste of tomatoes.
The resequencing of the genome of these 398 varieties has finally made it possible to identify genetic markers that affect chemical compounds related to tomato flavor, which include acids, sugars and volatile compounds.
“Our study has allowed us to discover that modern commercial tomato varieties contain significantly lower amounts of many of the chemical compounds related to flavor than other older varieties”, comments Antonio Franell from the CSIC, co-author of the work.
“In some cases, we can even predict which version of the genes is responsible for the alteration in the levels of certain volatile compounds and how that affects taste,” Granell clarifies. The latter will make it possible to understand the molecular and genetic bases of current ‘tasteless’ tomatoes and to be able to recover their flavor through molecular breeding.
The study has been published in the journal Science.
