Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. Giving tomato breeders and ketchup fans
something to cheer about, a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL)
scientist and his colleagues at the Hebrew University in Israel
have identified a gene that pushes hybrid tomato plants to
spectacularly increase yield. The yield-boosting power of this
gene, which controls when plants make flowers, works in
different varieties of tomato, and crucially, across a range of
environmental conditions. "This discovery has potential to have
a significant impact on both the billion-dollar tomato industry,
as well as agricultural practices designed to get the most yield
from other flowering crops," says CSHL's Zach Lippman, Ph.D.,
one of the three authors on the study, which appears in the
journal Nature Genetics online on March 28th. The study is co-
authored by Israeli scientists Uri Krieger and Professor Dani
Zamir. The team made the discovery while hunting for genes that
boost hybrid vigor, a revolutionary breeding principle that
spurred the production o