GMO Blue Flesh Tomato Seeds Coming

[William S.]

Yeah, a straight up Physalis x Solanum cross probably wouldn't work. If it could be done it would probably have been done by now.

I like how we keep trying to problem solve how to get blue fleshed tomatoes with breeding though. It might just be possible.

There is one natural solution that is easy though: Grow and breed with blue/purple fleshed tomatillos.

[Garrett Schantz]

Got a response to my email / question.


Dear Garrett, thank you for reaching out with this excellent question. Here is a first response, and I will work on an update to add to our website, as I expect many other purple tomato fans have similar questions in mind.
One of our drivers with the purple tomato is to show that it is not so different from any other tomato you grow - it has 3 genes added to make it purple, added on top of the 30,000 genes that all tomatoes have (and, of course, there is a lot of diversity in those genes and the total number, between varieties!). Therefore, the response should look similar to this question asked of any other varieties you grow (Celebrity, Early Girl, etc.).
Accidental crossing: This is low-probability, as tomatoes mostly self pollinate. It is possible, and the risk would be similar to other tomatoes you grow. It will not escape notice, because a contamination will result in purple fruit - if this happens undesired, these plants can be destroyed.
Saving, breeding, sharing: This is a strong tradition among many gardeners, and we support people growing the purple tomatoes in similar ways to any other tomato. There will be limits to this, and we will make them clear when we are able to share the seeds.
This answer depends on USDA granting regulatory approval.
Here's what to expect:
1) It will be illegal for the seeds to go outside of the US, as we anticipate approvals first in the US and not in many other countries.
2) We will stipulate that it is fine to save seeds, breed, grow fruit for home/community consumption. We encourage this, and look forward to learning of people's successes!
3) We will require acknowledgement that people who wish to develop commercial activities (selling fruit, selling seed, selling transplants, breeding new varieties for commercial purposes) contact us. Cathie Martin and her team invested so many years to develop this amazing tomato, and we want to make sure that she can continue to develop her vision for this tomato. We encourage this, and look forward to product commercial partnerships to bring purple tomatoes to our fans.
Thanks for your interest and best wishes,

Seems like breeding / seed saving may be allowed depending on how everything goes. Seems to be a few stipulations here.

I myself wouldn't mind contacting contacting them before selling seeds / breeding commercial varieties prior to doing anything. They put quite a bit of time and money into this.

This is a pretty big forum, it should be easy to notice any contamination, but I would be sure to keep these isolated from other varieties just to be on the safe side.

If you don't isolate these, make sure that you notify anyone else that you send seeds to that these were grown nearby to prevent any issues.

Even if the other person doesn't mind contamination, they could see purple genes pop up and send it to a friend overseas.


These are GMO traits, there are more legal problems than the standard stuff. Please don't try and be sneaky about this, you could get in a lot of trouble for sending unapproved GMO seeds elsewhere.

[William S.]

https://seedworld.com/purple-tomatoes-thanks-to-red-beet-pigment/

Purple

Different GMO sounds like a research effort.

[Garrett Schantz]

That purple color seems to be betanin rather than just plain anthocyanin. It was mentioned that 7 activator traits were needed, and 3 others as well.

Would be nice to see something like this on the market.

[Garrett Schantz]

Got another email 8 days ago about the purple tomatoes - seems to have been sent to everyone who subscribed to their newsletter.


Dear Purple Tomato Enthusiasts,

First of all, thanks to the many of you who have reached out with notes of support and encouragement for our project!

We have had a lot of exciting media coverage of the purple tomato recently, and we encourage you to share our mission to develop super nutritious and tasty purple tomato varieties with your family and friends!

Wall Street Journal Video
New Scientist Article
Fast Company Article
Cornell Alliance for Science Webinar
New York Times Article

We are unfortunately still in a holding pattern on seed availability, waiting on a regulatory decision through the USDA's new framework. As a reminder, we were initially given a decision deadline of February 16th, but the USDA is apparently still finalizing their review process around the new framework and also likely slowed by Covid.
We value the regulatory process highly and believe it is worth some extra time to set the right precedents.

I apologize to those of you who were hoping to start purple tomato seeds for your garden this Spring, I know this window is closing quickly for many of you. We will share an update as soon as we have news on this front.

Wish you all healthy and happy growing,
Nathan Pumplin and the Norfolk Plant Sciences team



There is still a chance that this may not be approved. It would be a bit late to receive seeds myself, I could probably get away with starting some mid season as they have introgressed the gene into multiple varieties, some which are probably early.



Another article that I found on the tomatoes https://www.fastcompany.com/90726505/behold-the-purple-tomato-a-new-designer-super-fruit


But Martin’s research found two other interesting things. Her purple tomatoes—not to be mistaken with dark varietals like black cherry tomatoes—last roughly twice as long on the shelf as a standard tomato. And mice that ate a diet of her purple tomatoes lived 30% longer than those that ate the standard red variety. A human would need to eat the equivalent of two purple tomatoes every day to reach a similar potential benefit, yet Martin believes that’s actually more feasible than eating the alternative of two handfuls of blueberries a day. That’s because blueberries are expensive and highly seasonal, while her tomatoes could be cooked down into pasta or pizza sauce.

Seems like some nice reported studies. Longer shelf life, increased life span of mice.

But Martin has little interest in controlling any genetic or brand IP, like Monsanto or Del Monte. In fact, her company, Norfolk Plant Sciences—founded in the U.K. alongside her colleague Jonathan Jones—leans closer to Iowa’s hippy nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange than a global agriculture powerhouse. As a botanist, she first studied how to use genetics to boost the anthocyanin content in tobacco plants. The problem was that anthocyanin production worked its way into the entire plant—including the leaves and the stem—which wasted energy and stunted its growth. With her tomatoes, Martin isolated how to increase anthocyanin solely within the fruit itself, and only when the fruit was at its natural ripening state. So these tomato plants can grow under the same conditions, and with the same yield, as conventional options.

I have noticed that some of my "Antho" tomato varieties get an increase in anthocyanin all throughout the plant, which stunts it for the rest of it's life if they are exposed to any cold temperatures.


Now she imagines a surprising way forward with her tomatoes. She will give them to the market however the market wants to consume them. That means she’ll sell you the seeds to grow them yourself. She’ll allow farmers to grow them and sell them to stores to sell to you. She’ll even turn a blind eye on you cross-pollinating these purple tomatoes with another variety in your garden. Martin isn’t protective of her product; she just wants to see it grow.


We should be able to breed with these from what I am reading here. As mentioned before, don't send seeds out of the U.S. if they contain GMO traits.

It was also mentioned that these should have been approved or denied by February - now they think either by the end of March or April, it will be approved or denied.


Anti-GMO fellows probably don't want it into markets, corporation-type GMO fellows probably don't want this to pop into markets either. Other groups are working on their own purple tomatoes, a non-corporation controlled type would probably destroy the market for types that need to be re-purchased yearly and probably cost a lot more than these seeds as anyone can grow them out for seed.

So, potentially millions or billions of losses and potential gains could vanish due to this free-use GMO.


I am hoping that this tomato gets released to the public. It seems like a healthy tomato, the color shows up in canning (purple ketchup?).

[Jeremy Weiss]

I am hoping that this tomato gets released to the public. It seems like a healthy tomato, the color shows up in canning (purple ketchup?).

Of course, a big part of it would be finding out of whether the public would ACCEPT purple tomato sauce, if indeed the sauce would be purple (the lycopene in red tomatoes (which is, I assume what she started with) tend to become more orangey as they are cooked, so the sauce might just as easily come out brown.  It's sort of the same reason I long ago gave up on making ANY heated product from green when ripe tomatoes; you heat a green, you get olive khaki.

If they DON'T, well it would be about as successful as my attempts to turn people on to my green soymilk and tofu (which was green because the soybeans were green). It didn't matter HOW tasty it was, no one wanted to drink green milk.   

[William S.]

I think given my investment in open-source plant breeding with an intent towards organic plant breeding that for myself a release of this plant material will ultimately mean that I would stop trading tomato seeds entirely and only purchase them from certified organic sources if that (I have plenty of breeding material). I would also stop using my parent's apartment patio tomato garden as a breeding space and probably my backyard also and only breed tomatoes on the eight acres where I can maintain them in excess of 150 feet from anyone else's tomatoes. I might even make sure to set back all my gardens 150' from the property boundary to make sure no one would pop in a tomato plant too close.

Though in theory if this GMO were to be accepted as certified organic AND OSSI struck a deal allowing such purple tomatoes to be registered OSSI I would be fine with it. Which is quite the dichotomy. But yeah under the current organic framework these seeds would be pure poison to my hopes for my tomato breeding work. Which is sad because these researchers put a lot of work into them but it just isn't going to be accepted soon by my target community.

Also it would make growing and trading with my favorite exserted tomato varieties much more hazardous for the organic community because without separation of 150' or more such varieties cross- that is what I like about them.

Which all taken together means this GMO release has the potential to ruin tomato breeding as I've known it these last five years. I suspect in some ways that it would force us closer to organic GMO if just because we eventually will have to tolerate some level of GMO contamination because once these things are released they eventually become too ubiquitous to completely keep out of things.

This particular release is probably safe and probably beneficial even- it is more that organic doesn't allow GMO that would cause me to shun it. I don't feel the same way about the widely released glyphosate resistant alfalfa for instance. I don't think that pesticide resistant plants are necessary or beneficial to anyone but chemical companies in the long run but the trait is going to be in alfalfa long after we have run out of the resources necessary to make glyphosate. We should probably be evaluating GMOs on a individual basis not as a group.

[Garrett Schantz]

I know of a few people that I could convince to try these.

Also aware that a lot of people will see "GMO" and shun it.

Something like this could easily "contaminate" organic exserted tomatoes as well. But, the Anthocyanin shows in the fruit the following year if there is a cross. From what I have been reading, Wild Tomatoes can pollinate other groups quite far away due to bees - pretty similar to squash in that regard.

I think that the creators of this tomato want an open source tomato that people can save seed / grow themselves and breed with. Someone on the OSSI board could try emailing them - that could open those guys up into legal troubles in the future if some court starts ruling on things. I don't know if they even have any sort of protections on the Purple Tomato from what I can tell, would need to ask them.


It would be interesting to see if this turns some people towards these types of GMO. A lot of the people I know don't like GMOs because they are used to allow for the usage of toxic chemicals on plants.

Glyphosate is more than likely toxic, some suspicious back and forth emails between the FDA and a certain chemical company were found, some of which reportedly mentioned awareness that this chemical isn't entirely safe.


I could try explaining to some people all of the GMOs currently on the market to turn them over if they really feel unsafe with this.


Here are some things on the market that are GMO:

https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/gmo-crops-animal-food-and-beyond

Some of them added things to help fight off viruses or pests, not just plain old pesticide resistances.

I believe there is a GMO pink pineapple on the market as well.


I do believe that these sorts of GMO could be really nice. A bunch of nutrient dense "superfoods" could be developed

Miraculin GMO tomatoes could prove to be interesting, especially if one of the "odd" tomato flavors from wild species was tossed in. Those will probably be GMO, and they are being developed in Japan.


There isn't a requirement to label things as GMO here in the U.S. - Purple Ketchup would probably be on the news, people would probably still buy it regardless.