SPICY
BREAKTHROUGH
While the chilli pepper and tomato spilt off from a common ancestor 19 million year ago. It turns out they still share some of the same DNA. The fleshy tomato stand in sharp contrast to the more agriculturally difficult chilli plant that pepper their spiciness.
Now scientist say that with the latest gene-editing techniques, it could be possible to make a tomato produce capsaicinoids as well.
The article published in the journal Trends in Plant Science, says that the objective is not to start a new culinary fad (though the authors do not deny it completely either) but to have an easier way to mass produce capsaicinoids for their part have nutritional and antibiotic properties that are used in painkillers and pepper spray.
Speaking about the study Senior author Augustin Zsogon, a plant biologist at the Federal University of Vicosa in Brazil said,"Engineering the capsaicinoid genetic pathway to tomato would make it easier and cheaper to produce this compound, which has very interesting applications."
The spicy after taste that capsaicinoids produce is not it's taste but rather a reaction to pain. Having chillies activate nerve cells in the tongue that deal with heat-induced pain, which the brain interprets as a burning feeling. Evidence suggests that evolution of capsaicinoids helped chilli peppers deter small mammals from eating their fruits. Birds, which are much better seed dispersers, shows no pain response to the molecules.
The spiciness of a pepper is determined by the genes that regulate capsaicinoids production, and less pungent peppers have mutations affecting the process. And while previous gene sequencing work has shown that tomatoes have the genes necessary for capsaicinoids, the study also found that they don't have the machinery to turn them on.
Speaking about using genes to produce capsaicinoids in tomato, Zsogon said,"Snice we don't have solid data about the expression patterns of the capsaicinoids pathway in the tomato fruit, we have to try alternative approaches. One is to activate candidate genes one at a time and see what happens, which compound are produced. We are trying this and a few other things."
The sequencing of the chilli pepper genome and the discovery that the tomato has the genes necessary for creating a fiery flavour paves the way of engineering a spicy tomato.
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