Color and taste: pigments play a role in creating delicious tomatoes

In a study published this month, researchers at the University of Tsukuba (University of Tsukuba) developed a new method that can quickly measure the pigment profile of tomatoes and use this technique to explore how pigments affect the taste of different tomato varieties And fragrant

The color of tomatoes is a combination of different types of pigments, including carotenoids and chlorophyll

Professor Kusano Miyako, the first author of the study, said: “Pigments like carotenoids have no taste, but they are precursors of pseudo-ubiquitin volatile organic compounds (AC-VOCs), which can produce The fruit/floral aroma of tomatoes adds sweetness-these characteristics are very attractive to consumers

Traditional pigment identification and measurement methods can be slow, so researchers have developed a simple method to quickly analyze a large number of samples

The results showed that tomato varieties rich in chlorophyll also have a higher sugar content, which contributes to the sweetness of tomatoes

Professor Kusano explained: “One of the orange varieties,'Dixie Golden Giant', has a particularly interesting pigment structure

The carotenoid content of fruits is affected by growth conditions such as temperature and light

Given its speed, the new method developed by the team is a powerful tool for analyzing the concentration of pigments in a large number of samples, and can also be used for other fruits and vegetables

The article "High-throughput chlorophyll and carotenoid analysis reveals a positive correlation between the volatile content of sugar and pseudocarotene in modern and wild tomato varieties" was published in the journal Metabolites

This work was funded by the "Sustainable Food Security Research Project", which was funded by operations provided by the National University of Japan Corporation and the Myanmar Environmental Sustainability Support Association

Journal Reference :

1. Yusuke Aono, Yonathan Asikin, Ning Wang, Denise Tieman, Harry Klee, Miyako Kusano.