currant tomato

The wild type, the currant tomato, is closely related to domestic varieties, “so we could crossbreed to introduce the resistance,” said Thomas McDaniel, a biologist and doctoral student at Newcastle University in England and a co-author of the study, published in the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development.

In June, he published a pet project, the DNA sequence of the currant tomato — the wild ancestor of them all — online at the Sol Genomic Network, a database containing research on the nightshade family, of which tomatoes are a member.