Dr. Darren Abbey

There are two ways to make a tomato larger. Make the existing locules (seed/gel volumes) larger, or make the locules much more numerous. Some large tomatoes use the first approach, yielding very wet and messy slices. I've been working with the other approach in my tomatoes.

The red pigment is important in the stress response of plants, so simply turning off the gene isn't going to work. I have a variety that has the red & blue pigments turned off in the seed-coat, but red is still active in the flowers. This is likely due to a promoter mutation. I'm crossing that cream-seeded variety to my blue common bean this year, which should yield hybrids with bright magenta flowers and blue seeds. It'll take a few years to stabilize those hybrids into a new variety.

This is a variety called "Painted Lady". https://www.marysheirloomseeds.com/products/painted-lady-runner-bean It has the red pigment turned off both in the seed coat and in the lower petals. I suspect the genetics here would let me produce a bright magenta and blue flower.

Tomatillos: The next generation of my purple storage tomatillos will be grown. The goal for these is to be able to store them at room temperature in home conditions from one harvest until the next so that you can have the fresh fruit year-round (if you plant enough).

Tomatoes: I'm growing out an F2 population derived from a cross between my white cherry tomato and my pink/yellow-striped beefsteak tomato. The F1 was medium-sized and orange.

To make a blue-flowered version, I need some genetics I don't yet have. Ideally, it'd be some promoter mutation that turned off red pigment just in the flowers, so the pathway was still available for the stress response. To also have blue seeds may not be possible.

Tomatoes: I'll be setting up a cross between the GMO purple tomato and an elongated type with a SUN overexpression mutation as a first step towards a black heart tomato.

There's some interesting biology behind this. By the males shedding their antlers before winter, the males then have to seek different food sources in winter than the females have access to. This temporary ecological separation allows more animals to survive the limited food availability harsh winters. Or something like that.

You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Or in greater detail here: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub815_web.pdf