Better quality crops from tomato and potato research

By studying potatoes and tomatoes, the EU-SOL project set out fi ve years ago to discover just what can improve the quality of our food today for the consumer, producer and processors – and biodiversity has been the key. Dr René Klein Lankhorst tells Projects more about this important work..

Exploration into biodiversity by European scientists could lead to more health-giving and longer-lasting tomatoes and other crops for people all around the world. “Our entire project is about the quality in tomatoes, potatoes and other vegetables,” says Dr René Klein Lankhorst, co-ordinator of the EU-SOL project. “For consumers there are implications in taste, smell and shelf life. There is also a health component – in the minerals and antioxidants to be found in this food. And there could be benefits for producers and processors in terms of heat resistance and plant architecture.”

EU-SOL is a five-year project that began in 2006 and finishes at the end of April. Klein Lankhorst is a senior scientist at Plant Research International, which is part of Wageningen University and Research Centre. Five years ago a network of plant scientists joined to focus on the development of high quality and healthy tomato and potato varieties with improved traits. The consortium has brought together expertise across a wide variety of disciplines, from taxonomy to molecular biology to consumer integration. The members come from across the EU, Israel, Palestinian Territories, South America and South Africa. “It has been a great experience dealing with different countries and adapting management to their different cultures,” says Klein Lankhorst.

Tomato fruits and potato tubers, belonging to the Nightshade family (Solanaceae), are, from an economical and nutritional point of view, the two most important non-cereal products in the EU. In China, the US, India and other parts of the world, these crops account for an essential part of agricultural production and human nutrition. Tomato and potato products are a multibillion-euro business that provides an income for vast numbers in the breeding industry, agriculture, processing industry, and trade.

The world market for tomatoes and potatoes is highly dynamic, and consumers and producers demand products with new characteristics. Consumers demand better taste for a reasonable price. Quality and wholesomeness of food are two issues addressed prominently in society and the media, and consumers in industrialized countries increasingly prefer ‘regional’ and ‘niche’ food specialities.

Agriculture, however, is under pressure from many aspects. Globalisation, environmental issues, price competition, land shortage, plant pests and changing consumer preferences all demand adaptation of the agricultural system. So growers need crops requiring less labour, fewer pesticides and less energy. The industry demands fruits and tubers that need less processing and produce high-quality products. Such demands require permanent breeding for crops with adapted characteristics.

There is also, of course, a need to develop crops better adjusted to a changing climate, with traits for improved yield on poorly fertile soil and for tolerance of situations of reduced water availability or increased salinity. And there is a need for crops with improved yields that will feed the increasing world population.

How do the different stakeholders in EUSOL define “better quality”? “We use taste panels with consumers and professionals to investigate consumer preferences for different types of tomato, says Klein Lankhorst. “To widen the range of inputs beyond the direct partners of EU-SOL, we actively disseminate information about the project and backgrounds of tomato and potato breeding and ask external stakeholders for feedback: growers, environmentalists, food manufacturers, retailers, consumers etc.” This feedback is collected from interviews for the EU-SOL newsletter, a page with discussion items and a blog on the EU-SOL website (www.eu-sol. net).

Ultimately, EU-SOL is meant to provide tools for novel high quality varieties to be developed by EU breeding companies using efficient and rational breeding strategies. One of these tools is the use of DNA markers for selection of conventional crossings (Marker Assisted Selection). The results will also enable plant breeders to apply genetic engineering that exclusively uses genes of the same plant species (cisgenesis) but most breeders are reluctant to use this technology because of public aversion.

As co-ordinator who guards the overall progress of EU-SOL, Klein Lankhorst works with eight module leaders, each handling two to four work packages, of which there are 26 in all. “The project is unique in its size, as we are bringing together so many disciplines,” he says. “We have identified a large number of genes involved in quality aspects of tomato and potato. These genes have been mapped on the genome with the help of molecular markers, and in many instances we also have cloned these genes.

To now introduce these genes into the new varieties that the breeding companies want to produce, molecular markers are used that are tightly linked to these genes. Using these markers can lead to a highly efficient breeding process in which the desired genes can be introduced faster in the elite breeding materials than without using these markers.

“In theory, the desired genes can also be introduced into new tomato and potato varieties using genetic engineering and this, in its turn, will be a much faster way to do so compared with the use of markers. Since this is not allowed by law, this is no option for the breeding industry. However, in case that legislation will be changed in future, genetic engineering seems the technology of choice to quickly introduce the new genes into new varieties.”

Klein Lankhorst is emphatic that EU-SOL does not propose to put genetically engineered tomato and potato on the market because it is not allowed by European legislation. “We do use GMO technology to carry out our research programme, but for introducing the traits that we have discovered, the breeding companies will have to use modern breeding technologies like Marker Assisted Selection which do not involve any genetic engineering.”

Turning to work in the past year, Klein Lankhorst says: “We have collected about 7,000 tomato varieties from all over the world. We have gone into great detail analysing the genetic make-up of these lines, their height and weight, for instance, and put the results on our enormous database. We also have developed the ‘golden potato’, which is a rich source of pro-vitamin A, and is health-giving in the same way as is rice with pro-vitamin A.”

I ask Klein Lankhorst what would change perceptions of genetically modified foods. “This is a tough question; and I think there are two possible scenarios,” he says. “The first is that the general public (the consumers) discover slowly that genetic engineering is not as bad as they always have been told by people who invented misleading terms like Frankenstein Food. The plain truth is that currently 150 million acres of transgenic crops are grown worldwide already, with a yearly increase of approximately 10 per cent. This has been ongoing since 1996 and in fact, this can be considered as a giant field-experiment.

“In this 14-year lasting ‘experiment’ involving millions of acres of genetically modified crops, not even a single case of a bad stomach has been reported in any consumer who has eaten the products of these crops! So the transgenic crops currently out on the fields seem completely safe to use by consumers and this realization will spread through European society. This will be aided by the fact that GMO crops or products derived from them will enter the European market by importing them from countries outside the EU. Unfortunately, probably by then it will be too late for the European breeding industry to catchup and these breeding companies will lose a large share of the future market.

“In the second scenario, genetically modified food will be developed which is highly desired by the European consumers, but which cannot be made using conventional technologies, so there is no alternative way to produce these products. As an example, one can think of tomatoes with a proven anti-cancer effect or potatoes curing heart diseases. Such products, which don’t exist nowadays, will find their way to the market quite quickly, irrespective of what opponents of GMtechnology will do since the consumers will demand that they get the opportunity to buy these products. In this scenario, the scientific community and the breeding industry thus play a pivotal role as they face the challenge to design and develop these new food commodities.”

The research could go a long way towards helping the farming community of Europe, and in the UK. “Our research will aid the development of novel crop varieties by the breeding industry and of course all these varieties will be grown and traded by the farming community,” says Klein Lankhorst.

“As part from our consumer study in Europe, it became evident that the consumers value a wide range of different tomato varieties. From earlier research, it is already known that consumers in Europe also favour locally grown vegetables and fruits. Together, I think this offers a good opportunity for the European farming community, and thus also for the UK farming community, to successfully grow a wide variety of new crops in future which will have partly resulted from the EU-SOL project.”

As this phase of the project draws to a close, the results hint at new possibilities for development in what is inherently a highly dynamic area of scientific investigation and agrarian production. The findings and techniques from the EUSOL project could have future implications for other types of fruits, vegetables and plantfoods in general. “However, for now, the focus is on the tomato, the potato, the consumer and public perception.”

Published: Monday, 23rd May 2011