When you complain about the tasteless fruits and vegetables in the supermarket, have you ever thought of “customizing†fresh and delicious foods according to your taste preferences?
No, scientists at the Plant Innovation Institute at the University of Florida are working on this research. Professor Harry J. Klee (Harry J. Kerry) and his colleagues are trying to boost tomato through biochemistry and gene technology. Taste. But what to declare is that these tomatoes are not the genetically modified foods that make people change their colors. How did Professor Klee do it?
Tomato puzzle
The tomato in the supermarket is not only less and less delicious, but even the nutritional value is greatly reduced. What happened to them?
"I have a 98% certainty that we can significantly improve the taste of tomatoes," Professor Klee said. He and his colleagues picked tomatoes from nearby greenhouses and placed them in glass (1376, 3.00, 0.22%) test tubes to extract the ingredients that affected tomato flavor. In the lab, Prof. Klee and his team will identify and study the flavor components of tomato. They hope that their tomato varieties can meet commercial planting requirements within four to five years, and even enter supermarkets within a year or two.
Like many other Americans, Prof. Klee found that tomatoes in supermarkets are becoming more and more difficult to eat. In recent decades, the tomatoes in the supermarket have not only become less and less odor, and even the nutritional value has been greatly reduced. Although the appearance of genetically modified tomato looks delicious and ruddy, but it is still light and tasteless. In fact, most of the tomatoes sold in supermarkets are harvested when they are immature, and they do not receive good care during transportation. They must also ripen under the influence of ethylene. In addition, even if the best tomatoes are chilled, their flavor will be destroyed.
Ten years ago, Prof. Klee participated in the Institute for Plant Innovation at the University of Florida and has since been working on the development of better-tasting, more nutritious commercial tomatoes. In fact, it is not a difficult task to grow tomatoes with better flavor and higher nutritional value. Go to the farmer's market to look for, or grafting supermarket varieties and natural tomatoes, planting in their own backyard, can be harvested to taste more than the supermarket tomato. However, it is difficult to make it difficult for hybrids to meet the demand for mass production. Plants have poor disease resistance and their appearance is not beautiful, and therefore their commercial value is not high.
Farmers are inevitably blind to the tomatoes in the supermarket for the sake of income. As Professor Klee pointed out, this is both a biological problem and an economic problem.
Professor Klee's goal is to improve the DNA of tomatoes through traditional methods of cultivation, thereby enhancing taste without losing its commercial quality. Prof. Klee said: “I have found that we can significantly improve tomato taste through about 5 key genes.†He pointed out that three of the genes controlling the key flavor components have been successfully positioned, and the next step is to find a large number of gene versions.
In fact, the taste of tomato is mainly influenced by three factors: sugar, acid and volatile chemicals, in which the volatile chemicals bring the aroma of the fruit into the air through diffusion. Surprisingly, Professor Klee's research found that the sweetness of tomatoes not only depends on the amount of sugar, some volatile components will enhance the actual perception of sweetness.
But there are more than 400 kinds of volatile chemicals in the tomato. The first thing Mr. Klee's research needs to do is to find out the key ingredients to enhance tomato taste from these volatile chemicals. In order to study its volatile chemicals, Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, a taste expert at the University of Florida, also participated in Professor Klee's research. The scientists grind the tomatoes, study the ingredients of the tomatoes and ask people to try them out and collect feedback.
Subsequently, Professor Klee and his colleagues used the collected data to analyze the relationship between human preferences and the flavor components of a particular tomato to design an ideal tomato chemical formula. Through taste analysis tests, they came to some surprising conclusions. Some of the ingredients appear to be abundant in many tomato varieties and are easily thought to be the main influencing factors of tomato taste, but in fact they are fundamental to tomato flavor. It is irrelevant, and although some ingredients are present in small quantities, they play a major role in determining the flavor of tomato. Dr. Batschuk said that with these new understandings, "you can't help but want to cultivate better tomatoes."
Lost transgenes
Prof. Klee will use transgenic technology during the research but will not be used in the market for tomatoes.
In past tomato cultivation experiments, people tried to raise sugar, but they only realized that some big tomatoes were grown in a short period of time. Because they could not get enough energy and light through photosynthesis, they could not support the flow of sugar.
Compared with sugar, those sweetness-enhancing flavor components are not present in plants. It is obviously easier to increase the sweetness of tomatoes by letting plants produce more of these substances. Of course, this discovery itself also has a huge potential for application, because it actually achieves the effect of improving the sweetness of food without increasing the calories of sugar.
James Giovannoni, professor of botany at Cornell University, said, "Klee's work is very groundbreaking." James Giovannoni is an expert in fruit ripening and is one of the key leaders in the "Tomato Gene Sequencing" of this year's heavyweight academic achievement in this area. He also pointed out that Professor Klee’s efforts are not a simple task. "First, there are a lot of flavors," Giovannoni said. "Second, we don't understand many of them. How they generate these ingredients is still a mystery."
In fact, Prof. Klee did not reject the use of transgenic technology in the research process. Transgenic technology can help laboratories grow tomatoes faster and help scientists remove specific ingredients to see if they have a role in tomato flavor. However, he said that transgenic technology is only used for research and demonstration, and genetically modified tomatoes during the experiment will not enter the market. This is due to two considerations. First, consider taking care of consumers' feelings. Once the controversial genetically modified technology enters the market, it may cause immense reaction. Second, considering economic factors, GM tomatoes need to spend 15 million U.S. dollars to enter the market through a regulatory approval process. This is for universities. It is impossible to bear it.
With the development of genetic technology, the safety issue of genetically modified foods is controversial in all countries of the world. Research and evaluation of the safe production of genetically modified foods has not stopped. In fact, transgenic tomatoes have long appeared on the market. In the 1980s, geneticists from the University of California at the United States made this attempt. Based on his research, in 1994 a biotechnology company named Calgene developed a biotechnology food called "Flavr Savr." It is a genetically modified tomato and also the first approved genetically modified food. It is less prone to spoilage than tomatoes cultivated in the traditional way. This tomato was favored by the market, but after the acquisition of Kelgin by Monsanto, an agricultural biotechnology company, Flavr Savr did not continue to sell, and the world’s first commercialized genetically modified foods have finally come to an end.
However, Professor Klee and his team have no intention of copying this plan. This is also the key point. Prof. Klee’s goal is to improve the DNA of tomatoes through traditional breeding methods rather than genetic transformation. Therefore, although the research used genetic experiments to determine which plants contain the desired genes, his tomato still passed Traditional methods of cultivation are not GM foods.
Some researchers who also used traditional methods to cultivate tomatoes questioned whether Professor Klee’s method could be as fast as he said. Prof. David Francis of Ohio State University has cultivated a variety of tomato varieties. He said: “I don’t think molecules Biologists can change the taste of tomatoes because changing tastes is more complicated than modifying one or two genes."
Professor Klee is still obsessed with finding pure flavors. He does not care about those who question, "This is a blueprint." He said that this is a more ambitious plan. His efforts are to encourage more Americans to eat less junk. Food, eat more fruits and vegetables, return to healthy eating. (Illustration / Dong Haoran)
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