British researchers and tomato growers have welcomed the announcement that the UK is to play a role in an international project to sequence the genes of the tomato.
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The 12 chromosomes present in tomatoes have been allocated to ten international teams for sequencing, as part of an overarching “International Solanaceae Genome Project”. US researchers will sequence three chromosomes, while teams from China, France, Japan, Korea, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK will each study an individual chromosome. The British team will examine tomato chromosome four.
The £700,000 (US$1.3m) three-and-a-half-year research project is being led by researchers from Imperial College London, University of Warwick and the Scottish Crop Research Institute. The grant is supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and Scottish Executive Environment Rural Affairs department (SEERAD). The team will use the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridgeshire for the sequencing.
The researchers say that unravelling the genetic information of the tomato will greatly enhance conventional breeding strategies and enable the generation of new crop varieties with improved disease resistance and nutritional quality.
Gerry Hayman, executive officer of the UK’s Tomato Growers Association, welcomed the project.
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By GlobalData“Technical innovation has been the lifeblood of British growers. We have achieved spectacular improvements in productivity developing a wide range of new tomato types in response to consumer demand with the emphasis firmly on flavour and high nutrient content. Growers have had to be pragmatic in recognising that some new technologies, such as GM, are not currently acceptable to consumers. But this project should help to pinpoint desirable characteristics in the genetic make-up of the tomato so these can be introduced into new varieties by conventional breeding methods,” Hayman said.
