ITHACA, NEW YORK —Almost everyone agrees that store-bought tomatoes don’t have much flavor. Now, scientists from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) may have spotlighted the solution in a paper just published in Nature Genetics
Molecular biologist James Giovannoni with the ARS Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research Laboratory and BTI bioinformatics scientist Zhangjun Fei, both in Ithaca, New York, have finished constructing the pan-genome for the cultivated tomato and its wild relatives, mapping almost 5,000 previously undocumented genes.
A genome is a biological map of an organism’s genes and their functions. But a genome is usually of a single variety, which then acts as a reference genome for the rest of the species. This pan-genome includes all of the genes from 725 different cultivated and closely related wild tomatoes, which revealed 4,873 genes that were absent from the original reference genome.
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