eorganic talk from Joseph

[William Schlegel]

https://youtu.be/6X2ajsToFEs

Joseph talking on the eorganic youtube channel

[William Schlegel]

In this talk I am pretty sure I heard Joseph say he would talk about tomatoes the next day. I downloaded the conference notes from the conference website. Not in the notes, so must have been at another venue in the area?

[Nicolas]

Yup, heard that too.

Very good talk btw

[Joseph Lofthouse]

My tomato abstract didn't make it into the conference proceedings. I've uploaded both abstracts and the PowerPoint presentations to http://garden.lofthouse.com/presentations

Here's the  abstract for the tomato talk.

The Beautifully Promiscuous and Tasty Tomato Project

Joseph Lofthouse
PO Box 538
Paradise, Utah 84328
Garden@Lothouse.com
Knowledge Exchange On Breeding Better Tomatoes
10th Organic Seed Growers Conference
Corvallis, Oregon, February 15th, 2019

Summary

We are developing a family of self-sterile tomatoes that are highly genetically diverse and 100% out-crossing. Every seed is a new auto-generated F1 hybrid in every generation. This allows rapid adaptation to changing growing conditions. This strategy allows tomatoes to solve problems for themselves that are currently being dealt with using poisons, labor, or materials. Bringing a few genes from domestic tomatoes into a wild-species background has infused tremendous genetic diversity and amazing flavors into the tomatoes.

Setting for Project

I started breeding crops for my own farm, because I live in a difficult climate for warm-weather crops: high elevation mountain valley, short-season, cold-radiant cooled nights. The crops that adapt most easily to my farm are modern landraces: Genetically diverse, locally-adapted, and promiscuously pollinating.

The vast majority of tomatoes that I trial fail to ripen fruit for me. Breeding tomatoes was difficult, because genetic diversity is extremely low in domestic tomatoes. The lack of diversity is due to bottlenecks during domestication, loss of accustomed pollinators in their travels, and ongoing human selection for inbreeding-types of flowers. When tomatoes were domesticated, they left behind 95% of the genetic diversity that is available among the wild tomatoes.

One year, when I was conducting frost/cold tolerance trails on tomatoes, I noticed that the variety Jagodka had a bumblebee on the flowers almost any time I visited, while the rest of the patch rarely attracted pollinators. That got me to thinking that if I could select for more promiscuous tomatoes, that a natural cross pollination rate higher than the typical 3-5% would allow for quicker local-adaptation.

Method

During searches for more promiscuous tomato flowers, we discovered the wild species Solanum pennellii and Solanum habrochaites, which require pollination by an unrelated plant. They are 100% out-crossing. They have huge, colorful, flowers and bold floral displays that are very attractive to pollinators. They can donate pollen to domestic tomatoes. The reciprocal cross doesn't work.

We made manual crosses between domestic tomatoes and the wild species of tomatoes, then reselected for self-sterility and wild-type promiscuous flowers.

Observations

The most startling observation was the tremendous diversity of aromas, tastes, and textures of the fruits. Descriptions by taste testers include words like: "melon", "yum", "xxx", "tropical", "fruity", "guava", etc. The primary selection criteria is for promiscuous flowers and self-incompatibility. We are also selecting for sweet, fruity, tropical flavors. We are selecting primarily for yellow fruits, because of more favorable reviews.

Successes

The offspring of the interspecies hybrids show tremendous diversity in many traits. There is a lot of hybrid vigor. The traits for promiscuity are heritable, and selection is straightforward. Amazing flavors are showing up. Bumblebees and other species provide pollination services, therefore huge amounts of F1 seeds can be generated without employing human labor. Three species hybrids are showing up.

Difficulties

It's an ongoing effort to train ourselves and collaborators to treat tomatoes as a promiscuous species. The traditional way to make tomato hybrids is one pollen donor to one mother. It's been a challenge to get people to use a many-to-many approach. An early error in the project was not including enough wild pollen donors for the initial crosses. Introducing wild genetics decreased local-adaptability in early generations. Acidic, funky tastes are showing up as well.

Collaboration

I am sharing seed with vetted collaborators, who are willing to observe, cull, select, and return seed from desired phenotypes.

Gratitude

I'd like to express gratitude to: The team at Row 7 Seeds, for their ongoing support and encouragement. World Tomato Society, for covering my travel expenses to attend this conference. Organic Seed Alliance for the opportunity to present. Nipomo Native Seeds, for winter grow outs. Andrew Barney, and ten thousand years worth of mostly illiterate plant breeders and explorers, for the original seeds. William Schlegel, for collaboration and insight. Rocky Mountain seed alliance for finding me, and getting me off the farm.  The Open Source Seed Initiative, for inspiration and wisdom. Experimental Farm Network, for freeing up my time to work on this project.

[Nicolas]

Great, thanks for sharing