快猫短视频

GIANT fruit, vegetables or even rice grains could appear on supermarket
shelves following the identification of the main gene that determines the size
of tomatoes. It鈥檚 the first time that a gene for a quantitative trait such as
height or weight has been found.

鈥淲e think this is a member of a new family of genes,鈥� says Steven Tanksley of
Cornell University in New York. 鈥淭he gene controls cell division very early in
flower development. The parts of the flower that become the fruit have more
cells even before they are pollinated.鈥�

Tanksley鈥檚 team pinpointed the location of the ORFX gene by crossing
different strains of tomato. When they took the gene from a wild plant with
small fruit and put it into a large domestic tomato, the fruit got smaller.
Doing it the other way round should make wild tomatoes bigger.

When the researchers compared the gene with others in public databases, they
found related genes in many plants. Understanding how these genes work should
eventually allow biologists to control the size of parts of plants.

鈥淎t the moment, we are changing crops by conventional breeding,鈥� says
geneticist Barbara Pickersgill of Reading University. 鈥淚f we have now fished
something out of the tomato that affects fruit size, then we could have a
speeded-up way of domesticating a crop.鈥�