by Meet the unexpected ancestors of the potato: the tomato.
That’s right, a fruit. Potatoes and tomatoes do not look straight away, do not smell the same or taste equally, but in a study published on Thursday in the journal Cell, scientists said that the potatoes developed from a tomato ancestor about 9 million years ago.
“We finally solved the secret of where potatoes came from,” said the corresponding author Sanwen Huang from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences China in a press release.
The origin of modern potatoes has confused scientists for years. With regard to the appearance, potatoes of a species from Chile, which is referred to as etuberosum, resemble a decisive difference: etuberosum does not produce the star -rich tubers. The tomato comes into play there.
While tomatoes do not have tubers, the ancient tomato provided a crucial gene, which, according to the researchers, was to be communicated if it was mixed with the genetics of etuberosum. The Sp6a gene from the tomato parent divides the potato plant to prepare tubers, while the IT1 gene of etuberosum controls in the control of the growth of the underground stems that form tubers. Both pieces were needed to create the potato that is known and loved today.
Non -representative and bright types of the potato plant. / Credit: Yuxin Jia and Pei Wang
“Our results show how a hybridization event between species can trigger the development of new features and can enable even more types,” said China in a press release, the corresponded author Sanwen Huang from the Chinese Academy for Agricultural Sciences.
During the study, the research team analyzed 450 genomes of cultivated potatoes and 56 of the wild potato species.
“Wild potatoes are very difficult to try, so this data record represents the most comprehensive collection of wildly genomic data that has ever been analyzed,” said the first author Zhiyang Zhang of paper from Agricultural Genomics at Shenzhen, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
According to Merriam-Webster, there is also a linguistic similarity outside the descent
“The word ‘tomato’ began as a ‘tomato’ and came from the nearby word ‘tomatl’. Since the potato had been introduced into the English a few decades earlier, the word to imitate the form of” potato ” – hence the spelling” tomato “, according to the dictionary.
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