James Myers accomplished a feat no one has ever done before in 2011. The
first purple tomato with the same beneficial component found in blueberries
was released by a vegetable breeder at Oregon State University.
The Indigo Rose tomato, created by Myers, an OSU College of Agricultural
Sciences professor, and his team over the course of ten years, has taken the
market and other breeders by storm. The novelty of the tomato was well
received, but the anthocyanins in the skin's health advantages were what
drew people in. The public's interest in anthocyanins, the pigment that
gives tomatoes their purple color and includes beneficial antioxidants, was
at an all-time high.
In the past 11 years, Myers has continued to enhance his line and has added
four additional purple tomatoes to the mix: Indigo Kiwi, with an improved
growth habit, flavor, and resistance to leaf curl; Indigo Cherry Drops, a
cherry tomato with better flavor and yield than Indigo Rose; and Indigo Pear
Drops, a sweet, pear-shaped fruit. The most recent is Midnight Roma, a paste
tomato that was introduced in 2021 and is utilized by professional chefs and
home cooks for sauce. These may be purchased as seeds online and, in western
Oregon, should be started indoors right about now. Garden centers will have
some seedlings available when it's time to plant in May, maybe June this
year (soil temperature should be 60-70 degrees F). However seeds could be
your best option if you're looking for specific types.
There are already 50 offspring from Indigo Rose, five from OSU, and the
remaining from independent breeders who used Myers's germplasm—the cells
that pass on traits from generation to generation. Although purple heirloom
tomatoes like Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, and Black Prince are already
well-known to gardeners, the purple color in those tomatoes is really
created by pheophytin, a pigment devoid of anthocyanins.
Myers and his students laboriously crossed plants that had the ability to
pass on the purple gene to their progeny—often by hand from male stamen to
female style. A purple tomato that was good enough to be released to
breeders and home gardeners was obtained after he and his team crossed the
best of the finest grown in the field for observation year after year.
Myers, who has been at OSU for 26 years and is in charge of producing a
green bean variety that processors use on 80% of the land in Oregon, created
the hybrid that produced Indigo Rose using genetic material from wild
tomatoes kept in the germplasm collection at University of California,
Davis. Two breeders went to Chile and the Galapagos Islands in the 1960s to
gather the wild stock.
Breeders combined wild tomatoes with cultivated types, but research didn't
advance until Carl Jones, a PhD student, started studying how tomatoes
influence human health in the early 2000s, when Myers started his work.
According to Myers, as Jones examined the wild species' germplasm from U.C.
Davis, he discovered a hue that resembled purple but had never been
described.
Efforts on developing a tomato that combined the advantages of anthocyanins
for health with those of a high-quality home-grown tomato—hopefully with
some disease resistance—began in earnest. After a purple tomato that was
edible was created, the focus shifted to field tests. Myers and his crew
planted tomato seedlings and observed their growth and production over 11
years. Every year, they cross-bred the tomatoes that had the finest purple
expression. They repeatedly did it, selecting the tomatoes with the best
potential. None of the tomatoes were created using GM technology.
"What would happen if we crossed the sources of purple fruit that
originated from separate wild species?" was the inquiry that led to our
major discovery. said Myers. "We chose tomatoes in the field based on their
strong expressiveness, resistance to rot and verticillium wilt, and ability
to survive longer in the field than typical tomato fruit. We located
it."
The newest purple tomato variety, a genetically engineered one from Europe
that the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved last year, will start to
appear. In contrast, Myers' tomatoes were traditionally bred and were chosen
one by one over many years. The new purple tomato, which has not yet been
given a name, will be available in the United States this year but not in
Europe since GMO foods are prohibited there.
