Restoring Promiscous Pollination To Tomatoes

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Jul 17, 2015 14:16:23 GMT -5 ethin said:

Found these flowers on a Golden Jubilee (Orange 6-7 oz fruit, Indeterminate) plant in the garden this morning Joseph.

Very Nice ethin!

[kazedwards]

Is this the type of flowers that you are looking for?

http://instagram.com/p/6Gx53hip7_

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Aug 7, 2015 21:57:27 GMT -5 kazedwards said:

Is this the type of flowers that you are looking for?

Sorta: The stigma is exposed which I want, but it has the pike-phalanx thing going on so that it makes it hard for pollinators to get into the flower.

Today when I was in the tomato patch, the descendants of SunGold were being worked by a bumblebee.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

This is certainly an interesting project. Joseph Lofthouse, if there were a way to make the tomato flowers more colorful i would think many more pollinators would visit them thereby increasing the outcrossing statistics. For example, the cover of Rebsie Fairholm's potato breeding book is quite striking. She has a photo of one potato that has purple flowers and yellow anthers, and another that has white flowers with purple anthers.



Does anyone know if there are any rare tomatoes that have colors other than yellow? any wild relatives that do?

[raymondo]

I've grown three relatives, if you count Solanum pimpinellifolium as distinct. All had yellow flowers.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Feb 1, 2016 15:17:31 GMT -5 raymondo said:

I've grown three relatives, if you count Solanum pimpinellifolium as distinct. All had yellow flowers.

Thanks Ray. Yeah, i'm not sure there are any, but it would be cool if there were.

As a side note, has anyone grown the wild Galapagos island tomato? Apparently there are two kinds. One is yellow, the other is orange. (Solanum cheesmaniae and S. galapagense). They sound particularly interesting because they have genetics for drought and high-salt soil. I had heard about a variety of corn or maybe it was something else that had genetics to survive in high salt soils. Whatever the plant it apparently literally sweated the salt out of pores or something to that effect.

One accession of a galapagos island tomato from USDA GRIN says it has high anthocyanins... hmm...
npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?id=1273859

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I have seen photos of white, yellow, and orange tomato flowers. I have seen a few tomato flowers in my garden that are striking because the flower petals are huge. Also, the way the flowers are presented can be amazing. For example, if there is a cluster of flowers that sticks up high above the foliage.

[gilbert]

I grew Sara's Galapagos from Sand Hill Preservation Center. It was not too special, a small cherry tomato that was exuberantly productive. I liked it pretty well, but didn't get seed saved on it. I may try again if I have seed left, I'm not sure.

It had the same wild vining pattern as Matt's wild, which was also a different species/ subspecies. Interestingly, Matt's wild was the only tomato that grew well for me in Pennsylvania. It doesn't grow well at all here in Colorado though.

[gilbert]

Joseph, I've never seen any tomato flowers that are anything but yellow. What varieties had the other colors?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Feb 5, 2016 21:28:37 GMT -5 gilbert said:

Joseph, I've never seen any tomato flowers that are anything but yellow. What varieties had the other colors?

Variety names in my garden are typically long forgotten before a plant flowers, and often before the seed even germinates. I found that I could grow twice as much food if I didn't keep records, so I stopped keeping records.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Carolyn from another forum mentioned she has seen one with a yellow stripe down each flower petal. Unfortunately she currently does not remember the name.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Posted from another forum.

Originally Posted by olerist:
It would be interesting to see if the OSU lines had a UV presence. S. chilense parentage has some potential as it too is SI I believe (didnt look at that species under the lamps when i was at NCSU).

I think in some S. pimp lines there may also be potential as some accessions have been outcrossers (I dont think they are truly SI though). I never had the opportunity to look at those under the lamp.

Interesting thing to note: I spent a good part of the day talking to Dick Robinson (Cornell breeder and Charlie Rick grad student) about this during the Tomato Breeders Roundtable Meeting in 1994. I mentioned to him that the S habrochaites in the research plots had more bees visiting those plants than others. And that I had read a national geographic article several years back about UV patterns in flowers as a "landing pad attractant" for pollinators in the past. That got me thinking and I put some flowers from the field under the UV sterilizer in the lab and saw they were different from "normal" tomatoes. I wondered if he was aware of this. I also wondered aloud if this trait couldn't be exploited in commercial lines to increase set in the field. Dick told me he knew that some of the SI types probably possessed this but didn't know of patterns and invited me to Cornell for a PhD (jokingly). The next year he published a research note on exactly what we were talking about in the field.

Originally Posted by JosephsGarden
Last night I spent some time in the tomato patch looking for UV sensitive flowers. I didn't find any. The most interesting flowers that I found were the Lagenaria squash:

I just noticed this old post about UV stuff involving flowers. I recently watched a PBS or Nature program about bioluminecent and Fluorescent proteins in animals and corals (most often found in the deep sea). GFP being the most used in modern biology and synthetic biology. The show highlighted how fish usually have yellow filters on thier eyes so they can tell species apart easily when us humans cant. Red light only penetrates the ocean shallowly, but blue light goes deeper. So they use blue LED lights and use yellow and red filters to see different florescent patterns on animals they never knew where there.

I'm interested in doing this with flowers and plants. Did you two just shine a UV flashlight without using a filter to see the results? if so you may have been dissapointed. I have a blue LED illuminator and yellow/orange plexiglass that was intended for DNA gel electrophoresis of illuminating DNA. But it could eassily be re-purposed for this.

I know most flies have red eyes, some with green, some with half red half green. I wonder what colors night moths have or other pollinating insects or humingbirds.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Feb 6, 2016 0:17:48 GMT -5 keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) said:

Did you two just shine a UV flashlight without using a filter to see the results?

I used a "short-wave" UV lamp to take that photo. I think I remember that the plants weren't responsive to the typical "long-wave" UV lamp.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

westmtnapiary.com/Bees_and_color.html

It seems bees prefer colors toward the blue end of the spectrum. So i wonder if a bee would prefer a white tomato flower over a yellow one. Obviously purple would attract more if one could breed purple flowers into tomatoes from a close relative. Or perhaps one that has anthocyanin overlay.

perhaps a plant that has normal colored flowers, but has a higher rate of anthocyanin foliage as contrast would also attract more pollinators.


I'm just thinking out loud here.

www.visualnews.com/2013/04/08/hidden-patterns-how-a-bee-sees-the-world-of-flowers/

whyfiles.org/2012/bee-vision/

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Some of my tomatillos have a trait similar to poinsettia. Some of the leaves turn yellow, and have a hue that closely mimics the color of the flower petals. I wonder if that is a trait that heps to attract pollinators? Perhaps a similar trait exists in some varieties of tomatoes. I would think that people would be actively selecting against the trait, because "My tomatoes are dying". But I wonder if the trait exists in some of the wild tomato species?