You say potato, I say tomato? Turns out one helped create the other: Natural interbreeding between wild tomatoes and potato-like plants in South America gave rise to the modern day spud around nine million years ago, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Cell. Co-author Loren Rieseberg, a professor at the University of British Columbia, told AFP …
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Meet the potato’s unexpected ancestor: the tomato. That’s right, a fruit. Potatoes and tomatoes don’t look alike, smell alike or taste alike, but in a study published Thursday in the journal Cell, scientists said that the potato evolved from a tomato ancestor around 9 million years ago. “We’ve finally solved the mystery of where potatoes came from,” corresponding author Sanwen …
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Random mating between wild tomato plants and potato-like species 8 million to 9 million years ago may have given rise to one of our favorite carbs: the potato. Together with 107 extant, wild potato species, the cultivated potatoes we know today (Solanum tuberosum) belong to the lineage Petota. New research suggests that this lineage, or group of closely related species, …
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That’s it. That’s the news. Genome biologist Sanwen Huang knows a thing or two about potatoes. But his latest potato breakthrough may be his most shocking yet: potatoes are descended from tomatoes. In a Cell paper published today, Huang’s team reports that the modern potato likely emerged about 9 million years ago, when tomato plants married the etuberosum, a potato-like species …
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