Building a better mass-market tomato

By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times

GAINSVILLE, Fla. — Science is trying to build a better supermarket tomato.

At a laboratory here at the University of Florida’s Institute for Plant Innovation, researchers chop tomatoes from nearby greenhouses and plop them into glass tubes to extract flavor compounds — the essence of tomato, so to speak. These flavor compounds are identified and quantified by machine. People taste and rate the hybrid tomatoes grown in the university’s fields.

“I’m 98 percent confident we can make a tomato that tastes substantially better,” said Harry J. Klee, a professor of horticultural sciences. He hopes that the fruits of his labor will be available to commercial growers within four or five years and in supermarkets a couple of years after that. He thinks he can make seeds for better tomatoes available to home gardeners even sooner, within a year or two.

The insipid-tomato problem is well known both to salad lovers and scientists. For example, a gene mutation that tomato breeders love because it turns the fruit a luscious red also happens to make it blander. Refrigeration, transportation and other factors also take their toll. Over the decades, the average tomato has become not only less tasty but less nutritious.

Enter Dr. Klee, who helped found the Institute for Plant Innovation a decade ago and has been in a quest for a more flavorful and nutritious mass-market tomato ever since.

It is easy to find a better tasting and more nutritious tomato. Go to a farmer’s market or grow one in the backyard. It is also easy to breed a plant that produces something tastier than a supermarket tomato — cross a sweet heirloom with the supermarket variety. In the greenhouse, Dr. Klee pulls one such hybrid tomato off a vine, and it does taste sweeter. But a hybrid also loses some of the qualities highly valued by commercial growers — it is not as fecund, not as resistant to disease, not as easily grown, not as pretty.

Click here to read the full article.