The delicious taste of vegetables and fruits, agricultural scientists are working to restore it
Watermelon, melon, cucumber, pumpkin, winter melon, loofah... all are cucurbitaceous vegetables and fruits. Of course, the gourd is also one of the most important edible plant families in the world.
Yet they are all "gourd brothers", so why are some sweet and some bitter, and even within the same plant, why are some parts (such as the fruit) sweet while other parts (such as the root and stem) are bitter?
Recently, a Chinese research team discovered the secret behind this - by applying big data to the study of plant secondary metabolism, researchers revealed that cucurbitaceous plants have a very similar domestication history of bitter taste traits. Using this characteristic, breeders will be able to "precisely" regulate the bitterness in vegetables and fruits, thereby cultivating new varieties with better quality and taste.
Restoring the "delicious" taste of cucumber
On November 29, the paper "Convergent domestication and divergent evolution of bitter taste traits in cucurbit crops", organized and completed by Associate Researcher Shang Yi and Researcher Huang Sanwen of the Institute of Vegetables of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, was published online in the internationally renowned academic journal Nature Plants.
As living standards rise higher and higher, consumers have begun to complain that some vegetables and fruits sold on the market are not delicious and lack the flavor they should have. The acquisition and loss of flavor are closely related to the distribution and accumulation of secondary metabolites in plants.
Therefore, restoring the "delicious" taste means that the distribution of secondary metabolites in crops must be precisely regulated - edible parts should accumulate pleasant compounds, while the production of "natural pesticides" must be avoided. Since plants contain tens of thousands of metabolites with different structures, achieving this goal requires breakthroughs in basic research, and this has always been a key and difficult point in this field.
Compared with field crops, the research foundation for vegetable crops is relatively weak. Since 2005, Huang Sanwen's research team has been committed to big data research on vegetable crop genomes, transcriptomes, variantomes, and more, providing indispensable basic tools for studying important horticultural traits and carrying out molecular breeding. Subsequently, Shang Yi's group in the team began trying to apply big data such as genomics to the study of plant secondary metabolism. An internationally renowned biomedical paper evaluation system commented on their research work as follows: "It shows the role of the most cutting-edge genomics in plant domestication and synthetic biology research."
Under the guidance of this research, team partner and Researcher Chen Huiming of the Hunan Vegetable Research Institute cultivated four new South China cucumber varieties, completely solving the production problem of South China cucumbers easily becoming bitter. This was also a successful practice of "writing papers on the land" in basic vegetable research.
After cucumber comes watermelon
After achieving initial success, Shang Yi's group quickly devoted itself to another important scientific question: do other cucurbitaceous plants such as watermelon have similar molecular mechanisms? If so, it means that the cucumber bitterness research results can be used for reference to realize controllable non-bitter variety breeding schemes in other crops as well, completely solving the impact of bitterness on the commercial quality of cucurbitaceous crops.
After two years of research, they revealed that cucurbitaceous plants have a very similar domestication history of bitter taste traits. Using this convergent domestication characteristic, breeders can achieve precise regulation of bitter taste traits in the roots and fruits of watermelon and melon separately. On the one hand, this ensures that bitter substances do not accumulate in the fruit, guaranteeing commercial quality; on the other hand, it increases the bitter content in the roots to resist soil-borne diseases and insect pests. (According to Xinhua Daily Telegraph)