A researcher in our college has developed a soon-to-be-released tomato hybrid that may save growers millions of dollars and benefit public health.

Plant geneticist Majid Foolad has spent seven years developing tomatoes for Pennsylvania. His new plant, tentatively called the Penn State Cherry Tomato, resists diseases that typically ruin nearly a third of Pennsylvania’s tomato crop.

The fruit also contains three times as much of the powerful antioxidant lycopene as other cultivated strains of tomatoes. Lycopene is a compound that imparts red color to fruits, and research has shown that lycopene in the human diet helps prevent many types of cancer and heart disease.

The Penn State hybrid produces a deep red fruit compared to the paler color of other cultivated tomatoes. The fruit is almost perfectly round, with an average diameter of slightly more than an inch.

Unlike strains developed primarily for California and Florida, where more than 90 percent of the country’s tomatoes are grown, the Penn State variety thrives in Pennsylvania’s climate.

“Cultivars of tomato developed for California or Florida never realize their full genetic potential here,” Foolad explains. “In California, they can have two and sometimes three growing seasons. Our growing season in Pennsylvania is much shorter and cooler. It is not uncommon for us to have late-spring and early-fall frosts.”

The new variety also can resist the fungal blights so common in the Keystone State. That’s big news because tomatoes are Pennsylvania’s second biggest vegetable crop, after sweet corn, with an annual harvest worth more than $16 million.

Foolad says early and late blights wipe out an average 30 percent of tomatoes grown in Pennsylvania. Most commercial growers spray costly fungicides 10 to 15 times during the growing season to protect their crops, at an estimated $1 million cost statewide annually.

Ironically, Foolad found the ingredients for the improved strain deep in the tomato’s past. He started with wild seeds from the gene banks maintained at the C. M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center at the University of California, Davis, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Plant Genetic Resources Unit in Geneva, New York.

The resistance to blight and increased lycopene content were both found in wild tomato genotypes, which were painstakingly crossed and recrossed with cultivated tomato strains by Foolad and his associates to obtain desired qualities.

“Wild tomatoes are very small, about the size of a nickel,” Foolad says. “The plants are huge, 6 to 8 feet high. The wild tomatoes have some desirable traits and some undesirable traits. Using conventional breeding techniques and new technology that allowed us to map and tag genes to select the traits we wanted, we were able to develop a hybrid ideal for growing in Pennsylvania.

“We screened over 300 genotypes in the first few years,” adds Foolad. “We evaluated for blight resistance, high lycopene content, and other growth characteristics suitable for production in Pennsylvania.”

Foolad’s research is now focused on developing larger fresh-market and processing tomatoes with high lycopene content, adaptation to Pennsylvania’s climate, and resistance to blights.

The Penn State Cherry Tomato will be showcased to growers, patented, and released within the next year, Foolad says.

—Jeff Mulhollem