Why wouldn’t a Solanaceae Fruit like a Purple bell Pepper, Purple Eggplant or a Purple Pepino Melon do the trick? Why go Outside the Solanaceae to find the Purple Gene?
None of those plants are solid bright purple all the way through. Purple eggplants are white on the inside, they just have purple skin. Purple bell peppers are green or red-brown on the inside. If you just want a tomato with anthocyanin in the skin or lightly expressed in the flesh, you dont need any gene insertion at all - lots of tomatoes with some anthocyanins already exist. They’re just not solid purple all the way through
Wait so GMO still require Traditonal Breeding Techniques to Finish them?
Genetic insertion is a very expensive process that is performed on individual seeds or through tissue culture. “Traditional breeding” is “required” in the sense that growing a tomato plant from 1 GMO seed/tissue sample is a much cheaper and easier way of producing 1000 GMO seeds to sell than performing 1000 gene insertions.
In other words Landrace & Gmo are Fully Compatible with each other right?
You could absolutely include Norfolk’s purple tomato in a breeding population. Some of the resulting tomatoes in your landrace would be solid purple. Likely some other landrace gardeners would not want seeds from your solid purple tomatoes, as some do not want to include GMOs in their landraces.
hmm is this how we make Tropical Fruits that Can’t Survive Frost handle it better?
Gene insertion is probably not an effective way of breeding cold tolerance because cold tolerance usually depends on many, many interdependent genes. Gene insertion is only feasible for traits controlled by a very small number of genes with few interdependencies.
They’re never blurry. The tomatoes either have the inserted gene sequence, or they don’t. 100 generations on, the F100 tomatoes that are bright purple all the way through inherited the whole inserted gene sequence. Tomatoes that are not purple all the way through did not.
Let’s give a human example. I have a rare 2 gene sequence mutation in my eye colour called central heterochromia (my irises have 3 concentric rings of different colours- you can look it up it’s pretty neat). This is a dominant trait I inherited from my mom, who got it from her mom…etc at least 6 generations. This does not mean I have 1/6 as much heterochromia as my ancestor 6 generations back. Each generation that passed it on inherited the whole trait. When I have kids, I have a 50% chance of passing central heterochromia onto each child. If one of my kids has central heterochromia, they get the whole sequence and they have a 50% chance of passing it on completely to each of **their ** kids. If my kid is born without concentric rings in their eyes, they did not inherit the mutation at all.
Yes.
However, I would not say that just because the tools we use to mess with things in a lab are found in nature that all lab meddling is “natural”…at that point anything anybody does is “natural” ie breast enlargements are natural because they’re made from silicone, which is made of silica which is found in nature.
And yes, all plant breeding is a form of genetic modification. But many people feel there is a difference (moral, safety, whatever) between choosing a more purple tomato to save seeds from in the field vs playing with viruses to out genes from unrelated species in a lab
But in any case it’s certainly not an option for the average gardener.