News

Click here to read a recent post by Trina Kleist about how the TGRC developed tomato lines containing genes from the wild desert nightshade S. sitiens.

Dr. Gurdev Khush, a pioneering cytogeneticist and plant breeder, has been honored for his work on developing high yielding rice varieties.   Prior to his work with rice, Khush was a postdoctoral scientist in Charley Rick's lab, where he made major contributions to the development of tomato as a model organism for genetic research by developing integrated physical and genetic maps of the tomato chromosomes. 

Miguel Holle, a plant collector and horticulturalist who was an authority on the wild tomatoes of Peru, died April 11, 2023 in Lima, Peru.  Few people knew the ecology and distribution of wild tomatoes as well as Holle, or collected as many local populations.  His tomato field work began in 1970 when he joined Charley Rick and others on a collecting expedition in Peru.  As Rick recalls in his memoirs, "We had fallen in with the most wonderful person, who was to be our friend, colleague, mentor, and most delightful travel companion, not only for these three months, but for man

The wild nightshade Solanum sitiens, formerly S. rickii, is endemic to the Atacama Desert of Chile, among the driest places on Earth.  This well-adapted xerophyte was collected by Charley Rick in 1957, and described by Donovan Correll in 1961, who named it "S.

Dr. John Boynton a former graduate student at UC Davis, bequeathed a gift to UC Davis establishing a scholarship to recognize his graduate mentor, Dr. Charles M. Rick.  The Charles Rick Endowed Fellowship in Plant Genetics is intended for Ph.D. students interested in plant genetics.  Boynton began his graduate work under Rick in 1960 -- the image below is from his 1959 admissions application -- and graduated in 1966 with a Ph.D.

One of the mysteries about wild tomatoes is how they migrate to new geographic regions, and in particular what animal(s) are responsible for their seed dispersal.  Two wild tomato species, Solanum galapagense and S.

This article by Tejal Rao, titled Reinventing the Tomato for Survival in a Changing World, appeared in the New York Times on April 30, 2019, and describes efforts to breed tomatoes for greater resilience to climate change. 

This article by Barry Estabrook titled Why is this Wild, Pea-Sized Tomato So Important?, appeared in the Smithsonian Journals Travel Quarterly and explains the role of S. pimpinellifolium in tomato breeding and its precarious status in the native region.

This story by NPR's science reporter Dan Charles delves into the the uniform ripening trait, which abolishes the normal green shoulders on immature tomato fruit, and how adoption of this trait in modern breeding may be one factor in the poor flavor of commercial tomatoes.  The gene underlying uniform ripening was discovery by Powell et al (2012).

In this video by AndNowUKnow, Roger Chetelat is interviewed in the field about the TGRC's germplasm collection.

This article by Barry Estabrook for Gastronomica magazine, titled On the Tomato Trail: in Search of Ancestral Roots, recounts some highlights of a TGRC-led collecting trip to Chile in 2005.

This article by Arthur Allen, titled A Passion for Tomatoes, appeared in Smithsonian Magazine in August 2008 and tells about how the tomato -- and how it is grown and harvested -- have changed since its domestication.

This article by Bea Perks writing for Chemistry World magazine, titled Tomatoes Once Tasted Like Cucumbers, tells about the discovery of a class of volatile compounds (C9 aldehydes) associated with cucumber-like flavor in fruit of S. pennellii, but absent in cultivated tomato.

In this article published by In Good Tilth in 2005, former TGRC graduate student Carl Jones recounts the challenges and excitement of collecting wild tomatoes in northern Chile. 

Jones-August-2005-InGoodTilth.pdf

In this excerpt from a program on the FlavrSavr tomato which aired 9/23/1994, the PBS New Hour's Spencer Michels talks with Charley Rick about wild tomatoes.