Heinz 1706

In 2012, for the first time, the genome of the tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, has been decoded, and it becomes an important step toward improving yield, nutrition, disease resistance, taste and colour of the tomato and other crops.

The genome was sequenced from the "Heinz 1706" tomato.

The work was done by the members of Tomato Genomics Consortium, an international collaboration between Argentina, Belgium, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom, United States and others. Consortium researchers report that tomatoes possess some 35,000 genes arranged on 12 chromosomes. For any characteristic of the tomato, whether it’s taste, natural pest resistance or nutritional content, the team says that they have captured virtually all those gene.