September 25, 2019, by Aleisha Turner

Why won’t that tomato ripen?

Researchers at the University of Nottingham in conjunction with scientist at Syngenta recently crossed the commercial tomato variety S. lypocosum with the wild cultivar S.pennellii.

One of the intergression lines that was generated (with a block of S.pennellii DNA transposed into the coding region of chromosome 2) had an interesting fruit ripening phenotype and merited further study (it didn’t ripen properly!). Using a combination of DNA, RNA, sRNA and bisulphite sequencing we were able to categorise the exact location of the intergressed DNA, show that this region contained several genes that were capable of controlling DNA methylation which in turn appeared to be regulating genome wide transcription of both genes and sRNA’s relating to fruit ripening.

This work in unpublished but has formed the basis for several follow up studies.

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