Tomatoes don't taste as good as they used to. The reason is in its genes

Caption

UGA horticulture professor Esther van der Knaap tends to a tomato plant. She says that with modern plant genomics, it should be easy for tomato breeders to reintroduce a key flavor gene that has been bred out of most tomatoes while keeping the fruit's yields and disease-resistance high.

Credit: Andrew Davis Tucker/UGA

If you’ve ever anticipated that first bite of a tomato sandwich and been disappointed, there might be an explanation.

New research from the University of Georgia has identified a tomato gene responsible for flavor. It’s why a home-grown heirloom tomato often tastes better than what you bought at the store.

As growers domesticated the tomato for large-scale agriculture, they selected for traits such as disease resistance or crop yield, according to UGA horticulture professor Esther van der Knaap. But that had an unintended consequence.

"In that selection process, inadvertently the good gene was lost," she said. "And the story here highlights for breeders now how they could improve flavor of tomato by selecting this good gene in their germplasm."

Van der Knaap said that with modern plant genomics, it should be easy for tomato breeders to reintroduce the gene for flavor while keeping yields and disease resistance high. So maybe, someday, a future tomato sandwich will hit the taste buds just right.