Source: Oregon State University e-newsletter

Researchers at Oregon State University have created purple-fruited tomatoes that include anthocyanins—the same class of health-promoting pigments in red wine that function as antioxidants and are believed to prevent heart disease.

Domestic tomato varieties grown and consumed in the United States do not normally produce fruit containing any anthocyanin, explained Jim Myers, OSU’s Baggett-Frazier professor of vegetable breeding. The success in producing anthocyanin-containing tomatoes—through traditional breeding techniques—could help researchers develop even more new varieties of tomatoes with other nutrients, both for home gardeners and for the food industry, he added.

Anthocyanins give berries and grapes their blue, purple and red color. These pigments also function as antioxidants, believed to protect the human body from oxidative damage that may lead to heart disease and cancer, according Myers.

“Tomatoes are second only to the potato in terms of the top vegetable consumed in the world,” Myers said. “Per capita use in the U.S. in 2003 was 89 pounds of tomatoes per person. If we could boost the nutritional value of tomatoes, a large part of the population would benefit.”

The OSU researchers developed the anthocyanin tomato through the characterization of the inheritance pattern of a little-studied gene in tomatoes called “anthocyanin fruit” (Aft). Myers and his OSU graduate students crossed a domestic tomato plant with a genetic stock of tomato that included a gene incorporated from a wild relative with anthocyanin-containing fruit and the Aft gene. The result: a domestic-type tomato fruit containing the purple pigment and the Aft gene.

The discovery is just the latest in a long history of vegetable breeding at Oregon State University. For more than 40 years, OSU vegetable breeders W.A. Frazier, James Baggett, and now Myers have developed more than a dozen tomato varieties for commercial and home growers around the world.

Assisting Myers on this latest research were graduate students Carl M. Jones, now at the University of California-Davis, and Peter Mes.

Working on his doctoral research, Mes is breeding new crosses of tomatoes and analyzing the antioxidant activity of not only anthocyanins in the fruits, but also carotenoids, another class of beneficial phytonutrients.

“The medical and nutritional research industries all are keenly interested in the health benefits of phytochemicals in all sorts of fruits and vegetables,” said Myers. “We are happy to find out we can accomplish this in tomatoes using traditional, classical plant breeding techniques.”