The Pink Gene (for Tomatoes)

When you look over the assortment of sizes, shapes and colors of tomatoes displayed in the market, do you stop to consider the time and effort that went into developing them (more than ten years to create a new commercial cultivar)? But a variety of sweet, pink-skinned tomato that's popular in the Far East could speed-up the breeding of new cultivars in this region. In the search for the mutation that gives these tomatoes their pink hue, Weizmann scientists discovered a "master" gene that regulates the levels of hundreds of tomato metabolites. That gene, say the scientists, might be used as a marker that could enable tomato developers to speed up the breeding process considerably.

If pink tomatoes aren't your thing, check out the sidebar on a postdoc in the group who is researching the medicinal properties of frankincense.