Purple "super tomato" may be on the table

Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, February 27 (Reporter Liu Xia) According to a recent report by the British "New Scientist" magazine website, a small American company has developed a genetically modified purple tomato rich in beneficial ingredients in "superfoods" such as blueberries.

The purple tomato was developed by Norfolk Plant Sciences, and company consultant Eric Ward said he was optimistic about the approval of the application, hoping to sell the seeds of the tomato to gardeners and supply fresh tomatoes and other tomato products to stores , "Our goal is to market these tomatoes as nutritionally enhanced products

The purple tomato was developed by Cathy Martin at the John Innes Botany Research Centre in the UK, and her team reported that mice whose diets were supplemented with purple tomato powder lived longer than those fed a standard diet or regular tomato powder.

Now there are purple-skinned tomato varieties on the market, but the newly developed transgenic purple tomato also has purple flesh, and its anthocyanin content is about 10 times higher

To do this, Martin extracted two genes from snapdragon plants and one from Thiel cress to add to the new tomato variety

The higher the anthocyanin content, the longer the shelf life of the tomatoes

"If we can reduce food waste, it will have a huge impact," the company said

In the U.

It is reported that the United States had previously approved a genetically modified tomato, Flavr Savr, which was launched in 1994, but the company that developed the tomato was never profitable and sales stopped