Lead UK researchers Gerard Bishop (L) and Graham Seymour check plants in a tomato glasshouse at the University of Nottingham March 30, 2012. 
 
 Lead UK researchers Gerard Bishop (L) and Graham Seymour check plants in a tomato glasshouse at the University of Nottingham March 30, 2012. 
 
 LONDON An international team of scientists has cracked the genetic code of the domesticated tomato and its wild ancestor, an achievement which should help breeders identify the genes needed to develop tastier and more nutritious varieties. 
 
 The full genome sequence of a tomato breed known as Heinz 1706, and a draft sequence for its closest wild relative Solanum pimpinellifolium, were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. 
 
 Researchers who carried out the work said that together the sequences provide the most detailed look yet at the functional parts of the tomato genome and show order, orientation, types and relative positions of all of its 35,000 genes. 
 
 The sequences should help researchers find the links between certain tomato genes and the characteristics they determine, and will also extend scientists' understanding of how genetic and environmental factors affect the health of a crop. 
 
 "Tomatoes are one of the most important fruit crops in the world, both in terms of the volume that we eat and the vitamins, minerals and other phytochemicals that both fresh and processed tomato products provide to our diets," said Graham Seymour, a professor of biotechnology at Nottingham University, one of 300 scientists involved in the Tomato Genome Consortium (TGC). 
 
 TOMATOES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT 
 
 The tomato is also a good model to investigate the process of fruit ripening, so understanding its genome should help reveal the molecular circuits that make fruits ripen and give them their health-promoting properties, the team said. 
 
 "For any characteristic of the tomato, whether it's taste, natural pest resistance or nutritional content, we've captured virtually all those genes," said James Giovannoni from the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University, who was part of the U.S. tomato sequencing team. 
 
 Tomatoes represent a $2 billion market in the United States alone, while in Britain the market for tomatoes is worth around 625 million pounds ($980 million) a year. 
 
 The research also offers some insight into how the tomato and its relatives diversified and adapted to new environments over the years. 
 
 The scientists said the findings show the tomato genome expanded abruptly about 60 million years ago. Some of the genes generated during that expansion were involved in the development and control of ripening, making them particularly interesting to tomato breeders. 
 
 The TGC involved scientists in 14 countries including Argentina, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, Britain, the United States and others. 
 
 Giovanni said the work has implications for other plant species. 
 
 Strawberries, apples, melons, bananas and other fleshy fruits share some characteristics with tomatoes, he explained, so knowledge about the genes involved in fruit ripening could potentially be applied to them, helping breeders and growers to improve food quality and cut costs. 
 
 "Now we can start asking a lot more interesting questions about fruit biology, disease resistance, root development and nutritional qualities," he said in a statement. 
 
 (Editing by Janet Lawrence) ||||| Nik Merkulov / Shutterstock 
 
 The genome sequence of one of the world’s highest-value salad plants — the tomato — has been decoded by an international team of scientists, and is published today in Nature1 . 
 
 The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is an increasingly popular fruit, with 145.8 million tonnes produced globally in 2010. 
 
 According to the leaders of the UK arm of the Tomato Genome Consortium, Graham Seymour at the University of Nottingham and Gerard Bishop, formerly of Imperial College London, the sequence will make precision breeding possible not just in tomatoes, but also in other crop species from the Solanaceae family, such as aubergines (Solanum melongena) and peppers (Capsicum spp.). 
 
 They also hope it will help in the development of tomatoes that can survive pests, pathogens and even climate change, as well as high-yield crops that still have a good flavour. “It’s really all about making a better tomato,” says Allen Van Deynze, a molecular geneticist at the Seed Biotechnology Center at the University of California, Davis. “This work enables a lot of things we just couldn’t do before.” 
 
 Launched in 2003, the project has taken some time to get results, but it has produced an “amazingly complete” sequence, the leaders say. With more than 80% of the genome sequenced, and more than 90% of the genes within it identified, and refinements still taking place, the group hopes to make this a gold-standard reference sequence. "It's one of the better genomes out there," says Van Deynze. 
 
 Evolving tactics 
 
 Giovanni Giuliano, from the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development in Rome, and a lead researcher on the project, explains that the group started out using traditional tools to sequence the genomes of the domesticated tomato cultivar Heinz 1706 (the one used to make the famous ketchup) and its closest wild relative, Solanum pimpinellifolium. 
 
 However, when the data still had major holes by 2008, the team took advantage of ‘next-generation’ technologies and switched to the much faster method of whole-genome shotgun sequencing. In this technique, large chunks of DNA are sequenced separately, pieced back together, then assembled into the genome. 
 
 Giuliano says that one of the most exciting discoveries was that the entire tomato genome was copied in triplicate on two separate occasions. The earlier event occurred about 130 million years ago, and was first identified in grapes (Vitis vinifera)2, but what interests Giuliano is that a second event occurred around 60 million years ago, and had major implications for the development of the fruit. 
 
 “Several of the genes ‘born’ at that second triplication stayed in the genome for tens of millions of years,” he says. “Then, relatively recently, they changed their function — this brought about the appearance of the fleshy fruit as we know it today.” The tomato is already an established model for fleshy fruit development, so the information will also be useful for breeding fruits such as strawberries, melons and bananas. 
 
 “The next thing,” says Johnathan Napier, a plant biotechnologist at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, UK, “is to link this genome sequence to traits that are useful and important, especially for food security and human health.”
– What makes a tomato a tomato? Researchers now know all 35,000 genes that make up the answer to that question, Reuters reports. An international team of scientists has fully mapped the order, orientation, types, and relative position of all those genes inside both a domesticated and a wild tomato strain. The results, published yesterday in Nature, should help breeders engineer tastier and more nutritious variations. The team examined the Heinz 1706 breed of domesticated tomato, and its wild cousin, Solanum pimpinellifolium. "For any characteristic of the tomato, whether it's taste, natural pest resistance or nutritional content, we've captured virtually all those genes," says one of the Americans on the 300-strong team. "Now we can start asking a lot more interesting questions about fruit biology, disease resistance, root development, and nutritional qualities."