Super veg
Find out more about the food you eat.
To help plant breeders improve the potatoes and tomatoes we eat we need to understand the background to the qualities (e.g. flavour) we are interested in. Below are some of the qualities investigated by EU-SOL and how genes can affect them.
Processes and nutrition
The quantities of the various nutrients in any tomato are dependent on the processes that occur while the tomato is growing and ripening.
Here we will focus on lycopene. The accumulation of lycopene occurs during the later stages of tomato development as the tomato ripens to a mature red colour. Of all the aspects of ripening in tomatoes; such as softening, an increase in sugar levels and a ripe tomato odour, the accumulation of lycopene is perhaps the most obvious as the tomato goes through a dramatic colour change from green to red.
The colour change is the conversion of the green pigment in the tomato into lycopene, which is a red pigment. The green pigment in the tomato is chlorophyll. This is the same pigment found in all plants, which is responsible for absorbing energy from the sun that the plant needs to survive and grow.
So why does the tomato fruit turn red? To understand that we must consider the role of a fruit; the production of any fruit is a strategy by a plant to spread its seed. A fruit is designed to attract animals to eat it, after consumption and digestion of the fruit the seeds are deposited (at some distance from the original plant) in the animals’ faeces. The change in colour of a fruit as it ripens is a signal to animals that it has softened and become loaded with sugar – in short that it is ready to eat.
Here we see a monkey tucking into an apple. Many monkeys in the wild are frugivores (eat fruit).
Photographer: Kandyjaxx Copyright: CC
In part the initiation and completion of ripening is stimulated by the light that the plant is exposed to. Fruit that does not receive sufficient light will not ripen properly.
