Potential for non-gmo purple fleshed tomato

[oxbowfarm]

I guess I don't understand why such a tomato would be useful or desired?

Tomatoes are naturally high in lycopene, and with existing known genes can be bred to be naturally high in beta carotene. A solid argument can be made that beta carotene is a much more valuable nutritional compound as it is a vitamin precursor and an anti-oxidant. Lycopene is a valuable anti-oxidant and is protective against things like macular degeneration.

There are MANY foods that are naturally high in anthocyanins, much higher than I suspect tomatoes can ever be bred to be.

[philagardener]

Interesting that the NPS group was publishing studies on that tomato 10 years ago! You would think if there was a market it would have been found by now but maybe the GMO approvals held that up.

Many of the early purple efforts from OSU (via traditional breeding) were said to have a strong taste, but maybe that was a result of the interspecific crosses they used. horticulture.oregonstate.edu/purple_tomato_faq

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Yes i have seen a weakly expressed purple veined anthocyanin tomato! Actually bred by paddymc over on the tomatoville forum. paddymc has been posting more of his projects here though. Let me see if i can find the photo and I'll be back..

(p.s. paddymac i am interested in trying to grow that line as well!)

Edit: here it is!

paddymc said:

The FY 1-1 is the most perfectly BLACK tomato I've ever grown (check out the video above,incredibly intense antho, combined with great, tangy taste. Far, far, better than most of the rest of the "Lunar Eclipse" (dark) types, which were largely tasteless this year (or worse, soft and tasteless). Plus the wild interior colors were a sweet suprise.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

P.s. i found purple carrots last year were one of the best tasting carrots I've had in my garden.

And last year i grew LA1996 which had the purple skin gene but the tomatoes were not blue only blue smudged and they tasted like slightly better standard red tomatoes.

It's hard to say how many might actually have the ability to produce it in the flesh or seed gel but first you need the anthocyanin expressing genes to even express it. I'm not surprised not many have it since most domestic tomatoes are pretty much genetically all identical give or take one or two minor mutations. The trick may just be making more and more unique crosses.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Apr 8, 2018 11:22:27 GMT -5 William said:

[...]purple fleshed tomatoes[...]However it happens in relatively short order this GMO trait will be public domain and once it is we get to choose to grow it in our gardens or not. If seed was available in garden catalogs next year would you grow it?

I would grow them.

I am not opposed to GMO, only to using GMO as an excuse to spray more and more poisons into the world. I keep a close eye on patented traits. It's a loosing battle for the seed companies. So what if they patent every trait in the world. In 20 years, all their patents will have expired. Besides so many traits go wild and escape their grasp. Sheesh.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

In purple foliage corn it is the result of transposons and so theoretically they can move around. I once bred a corn that had a purple stripe down its leaf a new form of it. But it was a runt and i lost that mutation. Maybe something could be done with tomatoes or taking a line like paddymc's and sending lots of seeds to a radiation breeding thing like that x-ray thread was talking about.

[blueadzuki]

One might want also want to look into Purple Calabash. That is legitimately a shade one could call purple (though probably not the shade you are looking for) Compared to standard tomato purple (which is more along the lines of dark pink with a bit of green thrown in) PC is a color that could only be described as "half healed bruise". And on the fact that given that PC is possessed of a lot of other atypical tomato traits (like seed tricomes that are bizarrely short and think) and a very murky history (no one seems to know where it comes from, and it's similarity to tomatoes in paintings from the 16th century lead some to theorize it is an original native Aztec variety) means I would not be surprised if it had a bit MORE diversity from the general tomato population than most others.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Cool. Perhaps this Purple Calabash would be a perfect candidate to breed with Paddymc's breeding line above to see if new unexpected recombination might occur.

To answer you're question from above about the GMO version i do not think i would grow it. The gmo version just does not appeal to me for some reason right now. Perhaps because the expression is too much and seems artificial in some way. I am not opposed to GMOs as a group though i am highly critical of past gmo techniques and amoral behavior and practices. Nor do i treat all GMOs the same. I consider them all individually on a case by case basis. Some i consider dangerous and some benign. Just depends on the specific one. I think we should be growing golden rice for example.

I need to send you seed for LA1996 at some point. It's a great variety. I want to try crossing it with my "Anasazi" tomato that has dark brownish color and good flavor with the green shoulder gene.

I have the other pre-blue tomato lines this year too for stem color and stuff. Since the other precursor line tasted fine i wonder if one of these others had genetic linkage of other chemicals that affected the flavor of the future blue tomatoes it was used to breed.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Apr 9, 2018 13:18:27 GMT -5 William said:

LA1996 is an accession that performed really well for you last year right?

Yeah. It did. It is also one of the lines used for Indigo rose containing the Aft gene, but not the atv gene.

I wonder if S. lycopersicoides might have dark inside the fruit.

[DarJones]

In purple foliage corn it is the result of transposons and so theoretically they can move around. I once bred a corn that had a purple stripe down its leaf a new form of it. But it was a runt and i lost that mutation.

The problem with red and purple coloring in corn is that it usually is accompanied by loss of vigor. Have you noticed that red kernel corn is rarely a large cob of corn?

I grew some of the earliest lines Jim Myers developed expressing anthocyanin. They were nearly inedible. Fortunately, there are several variations of anthocyanin including a couple that do not result in flavor problems.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Apr 14, 2018 9:15:28 GMT -5 DarJones said:

In purple foliage corn it is the result of transposons and so theoretically they can move around. I once bred a corn that had a purple stripe down its leaf a new form of it. But it was a runt and i lost that mutation.

The problem with red and purple coloring in corn is that it usually is accompanied by loss of vigor. Have you noticed that red kernel corn is rarely a large cob of corn?

I grew some of the earliest lines Jim Myers developed expressing anthocyanin. They were nearly inedible. Fortunately, ther6e are several variations of anthocyanin including a couple that do not result in flavor problems.

Yes. We have had several discussions on that phenomenon in the past.

Yes the first purple foliage corn i had had a tiny-tiny gimpy cobb that had four times the normal amount of husks. I now have some that have large cobs and do not have that problem.