Why have tomatoes lost their original flavor?

Does the tomato taste good? Still because of the high face value.

65438+1October 28th? (Reporter Jiang Jianke) Recently, good news came from China Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The research team led by researcher Huang Sanwen of Shenzhen Agricultural Genome Research Institute made an important breakthrough in the research of tomato flavor quality, clarified the genetic basis of tomato flavor for the first time, and discovered the regulation mechanism of tomato flavor, which laid an important theoretical foundation for tomato flavor improvement. The related research results were published in the top international academic journal Science in the form of cover articles.

In recent years, consumers often complain that "tomatoes are getting tasteless". In order to solve this problem, Huang Sanwen, a researcher at Shenzhen Institute of Agricultural Genome, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and Harry Klee of the University of Florida in the United States (Harry? Professor Klee) formed a joint research team of 20 people. After more than four years of cooperative research, he finally discovered the flavor control mechanism of tomatoes.

The research team organized 170 people's "tasting group" and conducted many rigorous tasting experiments on more than 100 kinds of tomatoes. Using data model analysis, 33 main flavor substances affecting consumers' preferences were identified, including glucose, fructose, citric acid, malic acid and 29 volatile substances, which revealed the material basis of tomato flavor.

The research team further found that the reason why "tomatoes have no previous taste" is that in the process of modern breeding, too much attention is paid to commodity quality such as yield and appearance, which leads to the loss of some gene loci controlling flavor quality, which leads to a significant decrease in the content of 13 flavor substances in modern tomato varieties, and ultimately leads to a decline in tomato taste. This achievement provides a feasible road map for cultivating delicious tomatoes.

This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Innovation Project of China Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Guangdong "Pearl River Talents", and the Genome Research Institute was the first unit to complete this achievement.