Hybridisation event took place about 9 million years ago, helping to ‘spark the emergence of a new organ’
When it comes to the senses, there could not be a greater difference between Friday night chips and juicy Mediterranean tomatoes.
However, scientists have discovered that these two foods are not so far from each other after all. Landmark research has found the potato evolved from a tomato ancestor nearly 9 million years ago.
Wild tomatoes, which grew in the Andes, crossed with a plant called Etuberosum, and through a process called hybridisation, they mixed their genetic material to form an entirely new lineage.
“Tomato is the mother and Etuberosum is the father,” said Sanwen Huang, a professor at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, China, who led the research team. “But this wasn’t obvious at first.”
