Tweaking one receptor helps tomatoes survive the fridge better
Crop Improvement
The mealy, pitted tomatoes you sometimes find after they've sat in a cold grocery truck or your fridge trace back to a stress response this research shows can be dialed up to protect the fruit.
Tomatoes hate the cold. Refrigerate them and they often turn mushy or develop dark pits, a problem called chilling injury that costs growers and shoppers a lot of good fruit every year. Researchers found that boosting a plant hormone receptor called SlBRI1, part of the brassinosteroid growth-signaling system, made tomato fruit noticeably tougher against cold damage during storage.
Key Findings
1
Overexpressing the SlBRI1 receptor gene in tomato improved fruit tolerance to chilling stress during cold storage
2
Fruits with elevated SlBRI1 showed reduced symptoms of chilling injury compared to normal fruit
3
The brassinosteroid signaling pathway, activated through this receptor, appears to be a key controllable factor in postharvest cold resistance
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Technical Summary
Scientists engineered tomato plants to produce extra copies of a receptor protein called SlBRI1, and the resulting fruit stayed in much better condition after cold storage, resisting the mealy texture and pitting that normally ruin refrigerated tomatoes.
The tomato is a plant whose fruit is an edible berry that is eaten as a vegetable. The tomato is a member of the nightshade family that includes tobacco, potato, and chili peppers. It originated from western South America, and may have been domesticated there, in Mexico, or in Central America. Th...
