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Title    Breeding Wildness Back Into Our Fruits and Vegetables
Date    Thursday February 11 2016, @02:13PM
Author    cmn32480
Topic   
from the evolution-beats-chemicals dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/02/11/0425201

Phoenix666 writes:

Wild tomatoes are better able to protect themselves against the destructive whitefly than our modern, commercial varieties, new research has shown.

The study, published today in the academic journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development, shows that in our quest for larger redder, longer-lasting tomatoes we have inadvertently bred out key characteristics that help the plant defend itself against predators.

Led by Newcastle University, UK, the research shows that wild tomatoes have a dual line of defence against these voracious pests; an initial mechanism which discourages the whitefly from settling on the plant in the first place and a second line of defence which happens inside the plant where a chemical reaction causes the plant sap to "gum up" blocking the whitefly's feeding tube.

Thomas McDaniel, the PhD student who led the research, says the findings highlight the natural resistance of wild plant varieties and suggests we need to "breed some of that wildness back in" instead of continuously looking for new methods of pest control."By selecting for certain characteristics we have inadvertently lost some really useful ones," explains McDaniel, who is based in the School of Biology at Newcastle University.

"The tomatoes we buy in the supermarket may have a long shelf life and be twice as big as the wild varieties but the trade-off is an intensive and costly pest control regime—both biological and in the form of chemical pesticides.

"Our research suggests that if we can breed the whitefly resistant genes back into our commercial varieties then we can produce a super tomato that not only has all the characteristics that we have selected for but is also naturally resistant to the whitefly."

Novel resistance mechanisms of a wild tomato against the glasshouse whitefly

Older article: Control of tomato whiteflies using the confusion effect of plant odours (open, DOI: 10.1007/s13593-014-0219-4)


Original Submission

Links

  1. "Phoenix666" - https://soylentnews.org/~Phoenix666/
  2. "Wild tomatoes are better able to protect themselves against the destructive whitefly" - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/news/2016/02/wildtomatoes/
  3. "School of Biology" - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/biology/
  4. "Novel resistance mechanisms of a wild tomato against the glasshouse whitefly" - http://eprint.ncl.ac.uk/pub_details2.aspx?pub_id=218511
  5. "Control of tomato whiteflies using the confusion effect of plant odours" - http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-014-0219-4/fulltext.html
  6. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=12125

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