US professor on quest for a tastier tomato
American professor tells of his mission to replace the bland supermarket varieties with a tastier, hybrid version by tweaking popular fruit's DNA
Science is trying to build a better supermarket tomato.
At a laboratory at the University of Florida's Institute for Plant Innovation, researchers chop tomatoes from nearby greenhouses and put them in glass tubes to extract flavour compounds - the essence of tomato.
These flavour compounds are identified and quantified by machine. The hybrid tomatoes grown in the university's fields are tasted and rated.
"I'm 98 per cent confident we can make a tomato that tastes substantially better," said Harry Klee, a professor of horticultural sciences. He hopes the fruits of his labour 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.