We often hear anti-tech nutters claim that improved crop cultivars are necessarily inferior to heritage cultivars. Their proof is that mass market tomatoes are insipid. This does not support their claims, it just shows that the traits selected for in those varieties - mostly suitability for machine harvest - are insufficient. Perhaps they are getting better?

For generations, agriculturalists and scientists have bred tomatoes for size, shape, texture, flavor, shelf-life, and nutrient composition, more or less, one trait at a time. With the advent of molecular biology, mutagenesis and genetic transformation could produce tomatoes that were more easily harvested or transported or turned into tomato paste. Frequently, however, optimizing for one trait led to deterioration in another. For example, improving flavor could have a negative effect on yield.

The revolution in genomics, with a wealth of data emerging from sequencing and simultaneous expression analysis of thousands of genes, has made it possible to study the numerous pathways and regulatory networks—systems--that operate to produce a desirable fruit. This systems approach in the new fields of metabolic and functional genomics is producing the tools, information, and biological materials needed for screening and breeding efforts in tomato and other members of the Solanaceae. . .

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is a member of the Solanaceae or nightshade family, which also includes potato, eggplant, tobacco, and chili peppers. The center of origin and diversity of tomato species is in the northern Andes, where endemic populations of wild tomato species still grow. These wild populations represent considerable genetic diversity, whereas cultivated tomatoes are genetically very narrow. The Tomato Genome Consortium is an international collaboration that is sequencing, mapping and analyzing the genomes of both wild and cultivated varieties. . .

Plants produce an immense variety of chemical compounds for growth, metabolism, signaling, defense, and reproduction. These metabolites function in complex networks and pathways in which they regulate and are regulated by parallel networks of genes. It is not possible to realistically model these metabolic systems one compound or gene at a time. Moreover, many, if not most traits in tomato, are not the result of one gene, but of many genes located together in chromosomal regions called quantitative trait loci (QTLs), because they produce a range of values in fruit or plant size or color, rather than just two extremes. Thus metabolites, enzymes, and genes must be analyzed simultaneously and in parallel in order to capture their dynamic relationships. . .

These systems approaches make it possible to model the whole organism throughout its development. Moreover, an understanding of metabolic networks will make it possible to alter metabolic pathways to produce fruits with different secondary compounds that influence texture, taste, aroma, and nutrition, as well as to improve yield. Metabolite analysis also has possible applications in drug discovery, nutrient enhancement and biofuel production. One important goal is the use of ancestral genetic resources in place of simplistic genetic modification to avoid possible deleterious environmental effects as well as resistance by consumers to genetically modified food.

Well, there's nothing inherently simplistic about genetic modification, but as with conventional breeding efforts of the past the focus has been on single trait change. These newer systems approaches are possible now, as they weren't in the past, since we have become so very much more skilled at genomic analysis. We now have more data and the computational power to analyze it.

The possibility of deleterious environmental effects are no greater from genetic modification than from any other sort of conventional breeding practice, such as mutagenesis, perhaps less so. But the public is still ignorant on the issue and various interest groups have made it politically difficult to use modern methods. This doesn't prevent the creation of cultivars with desired traits, it just makes it more tedious. Consumer resistance is irrelevant in the end since there is more than one way to produce desired cultivars, and it is only an irrational fear of certain techniques that consumers have been brainwashed to resist.

New varieties of food crops that are superior in every way - quality, productivity, agronomic traits - will be a key part of the solution to the problem of producing food for 9 billion or so people in coming decades. Genomics will play a central role.