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Tomatoes Are A Guy's Best Friend

Single sliced or pear shaped, you don't lose your shape.

 

Zero Cholesterol

 

Pear Shaped Tomatoes = Really Red

 

Here's an article that says there is a genetic reason for the pear shape of these tomatoes. Cool!! Or hot maybe, if you cook them...

 

A new class of regulatory genes underlying the cause of pear-shaped tomato fruit

Jiping Liu*, Joyce Van Eck†, Bin Cong*, and Steven D. Tanksley*,‡

 

*Departments of Plant Breeding and Plant Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853; and †Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Tower Road, Ithaca, NY 14853

 

www.pnas.org/content/99/20/13302.abstract

 

A common, recurring theme in domesticated plants is the occurrence of pear-shaped fruit. A major quantitative trait locus (termed ovate) controlling the transition from round to pear-shaped fruit has been cloned from tomato. OVATE is expressed early in flower and fruit development and encodes a previously uncharacterized, hydrophilic protein with a putative bipartite nuclear localization signal, Von Willebrand factor type C domains, and an ≈70-aa C-terminal domain conserved in tomato, Arabidopsis, and rice. A single mutation, leading to a premature stop codon, causes the transition of tomato fruit from round- to pear-shaped. Moreover, ectopic, transgenic expression of OVATE unevenly reduces the size of floral organs and leaflets, suggesting that OVATE represents a previously uncharacterized class of negative regulatory proteins important in plant development.

 

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Uploaded on December 19, 2009
Taken on December 19, 2009