Interesting. Can you give an example of a sft variety?

Damon

What a nice surprise b/c I know Zach Lippman quite well. When he left to go to Israel to work with Dani Zamir he was looking for 1000 different heirloom varieties to use in his projects there and between Craig LeHoullier, Glenn Drowns and myself we came up with those and sent them to Israel.

I feel a tad guilty that I haven't kept in communication with Zach but I do remember his e-mailing me when he got to Cold Spring Harbor and saying he was glad to be home where the pizza was better. LOL

If I were younger I'd ask him for the accession with the sft gene. LOL

Carolyn, who will e-mail him to congratulate him. Thanks Keith. As I recall his undergraduate work as well as graduate work was at Cornell and his Ph.D was with Tanksly who is head of the tomato genome project. My initial contact with him him came from a researcher at the Cornell Exp Station at Geneva, NY. And he's done some other interesting work on the evolution of the tomato in terms of upsizing and what genes are involved. Maybe some of you saw that work in terms of the cover picture of Scientific American and authored by Esther Van der Knaap with whom he also collaborated.

That's some very interesting stuff...explains why a lot of hybrids are known to be more vigorous than many OP varieties. Just cringed a little at the M word (Monsanto) and Roundup Ready crap...sorry I am not trying to start another heated thread so don't go there! lol

TGRC lists two accessions with the gene sft. They are LA2460 and LA2473. A few people already have seed and a few crosses with sft in the background.

DarJones

I would suspect if most had experienced this gene in the past they would have selected against it (not saved it). Most would not want to save a line that produce so few flowers.

Here is an example of a sft flower from Cornell's mutation breeding project. This is a sft mutation on the variety M82.

I like how the study points out that significant gains can be made with the right hybrid combination of parents. Hybrids really can do much to help feed the world. It's one of the reasons I encourage people to try intentional crossing.

If people start making their own crosses and finding parent lines which combine well they could start sharing that info with each other. Like saving ones own seed that could be taken a step farther and one could make their own hybrids (or have someone make them for them) that are suited to their desires or needs. The key is finding the right combo of parents with the traits one wants (and sometimes matching the right environment).

I have repeatedly observed some of the best tasting tomatoes in F1 hybrids. Think about lines like "Sun Gold" which when selfed and attempted to make into a stable line never does quite approach the same quality as the F1 parent.

One such parent which I have found to have great combining ability for flavor is Black Cherry. Most of the time I did get a hybrid jump in flavor when crossed with other lines. However that has not always been the case. It did not combine well with Green Zebra. That cross produced a true spitter in the F1 (the next generations saw improvements over the F1).

Others have been complete shockers. Such as when crossing flavor parent with disease resistance parent.

Another cross that produced great tasting F1's, but only marginal or similar to the original parent segregates, was 'Rosa de Berne' x 'Yellow Brandywine'. That F1 also jumped up in yield.

If someone wanted to look this stuff up where would a good place to start be Mulio?

I am not sure what you mean by "stuff".

Genetics

http://tgrc.ucdavis.edu/Genes.html

http://www.kdcomm.net/~tomato/Tomato/xingtom.html

There are other places as well sarg...email me.

the best place still is a library because journal and books are going to give you more info than one generally finds online. It helps to be in a university library that is going to have agriculture or biology related journals.

However if one has access to an account like Springerlink which allows direct access to pdf's of journals than one could find a lot from home or via any computer.

TGRC is a good reference tool. You can find out about different genes and some basic info such as how it expresses, what chromosome its on, recessive/dominant, other alleles and what parent line is in that particular line which they use as a marker. Still got to hit the journals if you want to know more.

Another reference is:
the Tomato Genetics Cooperative which has almost all their journals online.
http://tgc.ifas.ufl.edu/onlinevo.htm

I have a suggestion for searching it that seems to be a little more thorough than the search bar on their page. They have html versions on the server of older volumes but they are not linked and their search tool only looks at pdfs.

SO go to google and do a site/domain search for a keyword. How does one do that? Simple just follow the following format in google search bar

- [keyword or phrase you are looking for] site:domain_name.com

such that a search for single flower truss on the TGC domain server would look like
- single flower truss site:tgc.ifas.ufl.edu

These journal articles are probably not easy for most to understand. Still one can get useful info from them if you look beyond specifics such as a materials and methods.

An example of that would be a recent article which came out in Oct 09 in Molecular Breeding on the genetics of "black" tomatoes. They found that the gene which makes for "black/purple" tomatoes has 5 different alleles (variations of how the same gene expresses). It is a molecular based study which I can follow. However, in the materials and methods, I could not completely follow the molecular methods used because I am ignorant of the specific methodologies and extraction technologies. Still there was useful information from it in the results and discussion. I couldn't question the authors results on the methodologies but generally speaking one doesn't have to because such things go through the peer review process of people who do understand.

That was useful to me because I have suspected for several years that this gene had subtle variations or interactions by observation which probably would have been almost impossible to qualify without molecular separation. This is because year to year I wasn't sure if I was seeing a genetic change or an environmental one. But now I know why I noticed a change. For instance on 3 lines of the blacks I have had the most time working with (Cherokee Purple, Black from Tula and Black Cherry) all three have different alleles.

Molecular genetics looks at the specific region of the chromosome that gene is on and then compares the variations in base pairs (remember ATGC?) or transcription factors.

Thanks

I had said in a post above that I was going to contact Zach Lippman and congratulate him om his discovery and I had intedned to do that, but when I just came back to my computer there was a nice e-mail from him with a PDF file attached.

So now I will get in touch with him. ( smile)

Carolyn

Click Here for New Hybrid Uses Forced Mutation to Increase Yield and Sweet Flavor