High zeaxanthin tomato benefits from the gs gene

[Majas]

So, I learned about the Xantomato, recently. It is the successful result of an effort to create a high zeaxanthin tomato. However, the best process they discovered involves the inclusion of the green-stripe gene. I thought you would appreciate that, since you bred Green Zebra and all.

Anyway, here's a link that basically describes how to breed a high zeaxanthin tomato. It's a lot of reading, but I found most of it highly interesting, personally.

The Xantomato sounds great, except it apparently isn't as prolific as they were hoping.

I'm thinking they could improve the production a lot by using more prolific tomatoes in the process. Also, I'm not sure if interspecies hybrids with Solanum habrochaites are known for being more or less prolfiic, but if it's less, they could use the other route (a regular tomato with the beta carotene gene) instead of Solanum habrochaites, even though it would sacrifice some of the zeaxanthin.

They could breed multiple tomatoes like this (as many as possible would be ideal), and breed them together to get new kinds (which might have more zeaxanthin, and better production).

I hope some day home gardeners have the resources to test tomatoes for nutrient levels, including for things like zeaxanthin.

[Tom Wagner]

Thanks for bringing a good tomato topic to the forum

[DarJones]

Have to read up on the development of 97L97 by Stommel to understand this, but he elevated Beta Carotene levels to 40X normal by combining B^og with another gene that ramps up beta carotene production. 97L97 tastes pretty bad so I normally recommend using it to make sauce or paste. Adding just 10% 97L97 to a round of tomato sauce increases the beta carotene content to about 5 times normal levels and has negligible effect on flavor.

If you read the article linked above, the problem is use of High Pigment genes. It is very common for High Pigment to have negative effects on production. To my knowledge, there is no way to counter this group of genes. I would be more interested in a zeaxanthin enhanced tomato that started with a tomato like 97L97 and avoided "hp".