Scientists have sequenced the genome of the tomato - News

Thursday 31 May 2012
Adapted from a news release issued by BBSRC

Scientists have completed a multibillion dollar project to sequence the 35,000 genes that comprise the DNA of the domestic tomato Solanum lycopersicum and its wild relative Solanum pimpinellifolium, in a study published this week in the journal Nature.

They hope this information can now be used to grow tomatoes with beneficial traits such as improved taste and higher concentrations of nutrients, like lycopene, that are believed to have health benefits. In the future, it could also help plant breeders to develop tomatoes that are better equipped to combat pathogens, droughts and diseases, whilst lowering costs and improving worldwide production.

This international effort was led by The Tomato Genome Consortium (TGC), involving over 300 scientists from fourteen countries. The UK's contributions were led by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Nottingham, and funded by the European Union, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Defra and the Scottish Government. Sequencing in the UK was carried out at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

The tomato now joins a growing number of crop plants for which genome sequences are known, including rice, maize, sorghum, poplar, potato, soybean, strawberry, cucumber and grape

The market for tomatoes is worth around £625 million a year in the UK alone. Understanding the makeup of its genome could also benefit breeders of other related crops in the Solanaceae family, which include potatoes, peppers and aubergines.

The genome sequences will also allow researchers to probe more deeply into why humans have been able to domesticate some plants and not others, and could be useful in one day helping people to use a wider variety of plant species for food than the few they currently rely on.

Dr Gerard Bishop, who co-led the UK research team as Reader of Plant Biology in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, said: "The publication of the tomato genome sequence has been eagerly anticipated both by the international research community and by tomato growers and breeders worldwide. Coordinating the efforts of over 300 scientists across 14 countries has been a considerable achievement in which the UK has played an important role, and the outcomes of this effort are already having an impact on the global research effort to deliver better tomatoes."

Initially UK researchers worked on a segment of the project to sequence chromosome 4, one of the 12 chromosomes in each cell that contain the genetic information a plant needs to survive. Later, bioinformatics experts at Imperial contributed to the wider tomato genome project using computer tools to link sections of the genetic code with observable traits in tomato plants.

Dr Sarah Butcher, another author of the research paper and Head of the Bioinformatics Support Service in Imperial's Centre for Integrative Systems Biology and Bioinformatics (CISBIO), said: "Assembling the DNA for the 35,000 known tomato genes is like piecing together a giant genome jigsaw puzzle, with all the pieces representing the contributions made by individual experiments. Interpreting what the code of the genome means is something that can only fully happen once the pieces have all been slotted into place and the picture on the jigsaw emerges. This has required an international team working together for a number of years to solve. Some of the information was so complicated we turned to using powerful computer clusters normally tasked with analyzing data from particle physics experiments like the LHC."

Co-author and co-leader Graham Seymour, Professor of Biotechnology at Nottingham University, said: "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. The tomato is also the model plant we use to investigate the process of fruit ripening, so understanding this genome will help us unravel the molecular circuits that make tomato and other fruits ripen and give them their health promoting properties."

The sequences also offer insight into how the tomato and its relatives have diversified and adapted to new environments. They show that the tomato genome expanded abruptly about 60 million years ago, but subsequently, most of this genetic redundancy was lost. Some of the genes generated during that expansion were involved in the development and control of the ripening process and so are of interest to tomato breeders.

For further information please contact:

Simon Levey
Research Media Officer
Imperial College London
Email: s.levey@imperial.ac.uk
Tel: +44(0)20 7594 6702
Out of hours duty press officer: +44(0)7803 886 248

Notes:

1.  Journal reference: "The tomato genome sequence provides insights into fleshy frui t evoluti on" is published in Nature on 31 May 2012. DOI: 10.1038/nature11119