An Expert Vegetable Breeder On Innovating Crops For The Future

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. If you know me, if you listen to this show, you know that I love to garden. Tomatoes, veggies are my go-to plants. Well, as much as the rabbits and deer will allow that.

But one thing that has become abundantly clear as a gardener, and maybe you have noticed this also, is how climate change has literally changed the gardening landscape. I mean, as the climate warms and pests move into different regions, home gardeners and big producers alike are in need of more resilient varieties of vegetables. I know I certainly am. And in the world of organic farming, this is a job for a superhero, a plant breeder extraordinaire.

And lucky for us, we’ve got one right here to tell us about the ins and outs of creating new varieties of vegetables. Let me introduce him. Dr. Jim Myers, Professor of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Welcome to Science Friday.

JIM MYERS: Well, thank you very much, Ira. Very glad to be here.

IRA FLATOW: Nice to have you. You know, when I hear the term breeding on a farm, I’m usually thinking about animals, not plants. What is a vegetable breeder?

JIM MYERS: You can separate breeders into animal breeders and plant breeders. And then, within plant breeders, plant breeders are specializing, usually, in different kinds. There might be forage breeders, or field crop breeders, working on cereals. Vegetables is a whole class of its own self, and within that, there are all these different crops. So you have breeders that specialize in tomatoes or broccoli or squash or beans or peas, and so on and so forth.

IRA FLATOW: So how many vegetable varieties do you think you have bred over the years, if you had to take an estimate?

JIM MYERS: If you include my background with dry beans, as well as vegetable crops, there’s something like 28 varieties that I’ve released over the years.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. And do we consider these GMOs or are they something else?

JIM MYERS: These are all conventionally bred varieties, using traditional breeding techniques. And so they’re not necessarily GMOs.

IRA FLATOW: OK. So let’s get into the weeds, into the nitty gritty of how you actually do this. Let’s take one of your accomplishments, for example, the Indigo Rose tomato. I want to know about this tomato because I might want to have one. Tell me about that.

JIM MYERS: Yes. Well, the Indigo Rose tomato, and now, there are many cultivars that have been developed from it or using the same process, has anthocyanins in the skin of the fruit. You don’t find this trait in tomatoes, normally, but you do find it in wild species. And what happened many, many years ago where various geneticists and breeders long before I was on the scene were collecting these wild species and then crossing them with tomatoes, and they introgressed several genes that produce anthocyanin into a tomato background.

IRA FLATOW: What is that? What is anthocyanin? I can’t even say it correctly. What is that?

JIM MYERS: Anthocyanin. Anthocyanin is a type of a flavonoid. Colors flowers and fruits and vegetables, purple cabbage, blueberries. Many of our blue and red flower colors are all produced by anthocyanins.

IRA FLATOW: So you made a purple tomato?

JIM MYERS: Yes. The tomato is quite purple. In fact, it can be as black as an eggplant. The purpling is influenced by sunlight. If you have shaded parts of the fruit, then those will be the normal red color. Where you get lots of sun, it will blacken to quite dark pigment color.

IRA FLATOW: So I would imagine, then, if there are antioxidants in blueberries because of the pigmentation or the color, as you say, does that happen in your purple tomato also?

JIM MYERS: Yes. We’ve looked at antioxidant potential and it’s actually higher in these tomatoes than what the carotenoids produce. The carotenoids are things like the red lycopene and the yellow or orange beta carotene. And these also have antioxidant properties, but the anthocyanins are much more active in terms of antioxidant potential.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Wow. I want some of these tomatoes. All right, let’s go even deeper into the weeds and talk about the process of actually breeding this. Give me a painstaking description of how this works.

JIM MYERS: So tomatoes are a self-pollinated crop, which means that the self-pollen fertilizes that particular flower and you get fruit developing that is just from the self. In order to cross, then, you have to emasculate, you have to remove the anthers and then take pollen from a different plant and place it on the stigma of that plant. And then, you’ll get a fruit that’s a hybrid.

The first generation you get is the F1. And most people are familiar with that as F1 hybrids that they might grow in their garden. But breeders then will self-pollinate the F1s, and then those will start segregating for many, many different traits. And that’s kind of the process that we went through to produce these tomatoes.

We chose two different types that had genes coming out of different wild species, and when we crossed them together, we discovered that they had a synergistic effect and really enhanced the amount of anthocyanin that was present in the fruit. You have to go through a series of self-pollinations, about five or six generations, to fix all the genes in that particular line. And in the process, then, you’re sorting among them, testing them in trials, and deciding which are your best lines and choosing those. And that’s where Indigo Rose came from.

IRA FLATOW: It’s got to take some time to do this, right?

JIM MYERS: I figure about 10 years.

IRA FLATOW: Just 10 years?

JIM MYERS: There’s the generations of inbreeding that you have to go through, but there’s also generations of testing that are also needed to identify the very best lines.

IRA FLATOW: Can you get a few different kinds of lines that you would like out of one process here instead of just the one you wind up with? Along the way, could you find stuff that’s useful?

JIM MYERS: Yes. Quite often, it may be segregating for disease resistance, or maybe maturity, or if we test it in the right environment, we might be able to determine whether some are more drought tolerant or more heat tolerant than others.

IRA FLATOW: And then, could you take those traits and put them in the final tomato?

JIM MYERS: So typically, what we’re doing is we’re selecting for the traits that are under major gene control first, like the pigments in the fruit. And then, we have to select for the more quantitatively controlled traits over time when we have replication in trials to be able to make those sorts of selections. So it’s kind of a stepwise process. You fix the major genes, and then you work on the rest.

You start out with the population, like, typically, one of our populations will be 200 individuals in the F2, and we’ll go in and we’ll select a certain percentage of those and propagate, and just keep going that way and keep narrowing the pool down until you come down to maybe 1, 2, 3 of the very elite lines that have everything that you want in it, or nearly everything. And then, that’s what you would go forward with for release.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk now about climate change, because I started talking about how the changing climate is forcing us to come up with new kinds of plants. What are the biggest driving factors in creating new varieties? I mean, climate change is the elephant in the room. What are we making? What are you thinking about making for your plants or changing your plants so that they can survive and thrive in climate change?

JIM MYERS: Yeah, there are basically three things that I think about. One is heat tolerance. That seems to be a major factor. Another is drought tolerance. And then, the other is stability, which is the ability to perform well in different environments.

So with climate change, it’s not only we’re getting warmer and drier, but we’re also seeing wider swings in our climate. So you need varieties that can tolerate these changes in temperature and whatnot during the growing season. Now, beyond that, you begin to think about things like changes in pests and diseases, and sometimes, maybe even weed, your weed complex may be changing as well.

One of the interesting things for me, breeding here in western Oregon, is that I’ve actually seen a decrease in some of the diseases that have been problems in the past. Like, we rarely are seeing late blight on tomatoes now. This is the organism that caused the potato famine and the Irish potato famine. It used to come in periodically in the fall when things got moister and our rains began again. But that’s not happening so much anymore. So late blight is going away for us.

IRA FLATOW: Because it’s not raining as much, or what?

JIM MYERS: Right. We just don’t have the environmental conditions for the disease. Now, what I’m waiting for are some of the viruses that hit California in tomatoes to make their way up here. And we’re starting to see things like squash bugs. We typically haven’t had problems with squash bugs here, but they’re starting to move north.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Wow. Let’s talk about another project that you have done recently, specifically, two new habanero peppers that are debuting next month, Mild Thing and Notta Hotta. I love those names. Did you come up with those names?

JIM MYERS: Actually, it’s one of the chefs I work with that came up with those names, Nikki with Hot Mama Salsa. There are five different species that have been domesticated in the way of peppers. And we generally are familiar with one of these. It’s called capsicum annuum. These are the bell peppers and many of the chili peppers that we use, the jalapenos, and the cayennes, and so forth.

But there is another species which produces some of the hottest peppers in the world. These are the capsicum chinense types. And Carolina Reaper is probably one of the hottest out there. But on the other end of the spectrum are these types like the Puerto Rican ají dulces which lack pungency at all. This pungency factor, by the way, the heat is a compound called capsaicin. And it’s a level of capsaicin, then, that gives you the burn when you eat a hot pepper.

So what I came up with were some peppers that have just a little bit of heat, one of these chinense types, just a little bit of heat. And the other thing that these peppers have that’s usually obscured by all the heat in them is this wonderful fragrance and aroma and flavor that they have. It’s a very tropical, fruity, almost dessert-type flavor.

One of the things I’m working with chefs with these peppers, it was very interesting to me, because they were doing things with them that I would never have thought you would do with a pepper. And normally, you think of maybe using these in some kind of savory dish, but they were putting them into dessert items or beverages. Like one chef I was working with was making a soda with these peppers, and really wonderful flavor to that. Another chef, working with not my peppers, necessarily, but related peppers, made an orange sherbet with these. And again, it–

IRA FLATOW: Oh, that must taste good.

JIM MYERS: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing in an ice cream.

IRA FLATOW: So you do work with– you work with the chefs and they come up with the names sometimes.

JIM MYERS: Yes. Chefs are way better than me in naming varieties.

IRA FLATOW: So when are the peppers going to be out that we can get?

JIM MYERS: Well, we’re in the process of releasing those. And we hope that there will be seed this coming spring.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Have you ever had the experience of seeing one of your varieties out in the world unexpectedly? Like, who released this? That sort of thing.

JIM MYERS: Yes. As a matter of fact, I was eating at a restaurant the other night here in Corvallis, and this dish came and there were tomatoes in it, little cherry tomatoes, and I happened to notice that they were some of these indigo tomatoes. And I think it was probably my indigo cherry drops that they had used in their cuisine. Which it just feels very joyful when you see something like that, where something of yours is appearing. I’ve had people tell me, like, I was hearing a conversation in India about Indigo Rose, or I had a nephew that went to a meeting in Sweden and went into a grocery store there and there’s a bin of Indigo Rose.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Wow. Do you feel like that they’re your children when you hear about this?

JIM MYERS: Yeah. It’s kind of like they’ve made their way in the world. When you release a variety, it’s kind of like your child is becoming independent and leaving you, and there’s always some trepidation. Will they be a success or will they fall on their face? Those are some of the thoughts.

IRA FLATOW: That’s great. That’s great. I heard that a congratulations– congratulations are in order. You’re planning to retire in the next year or so.

JIM MYERS: In the next year. Yeah. I have some breeding projects to finish up.

IRA FLATOW: And speaking of that, what do you see on the horizon for your successors? What are some of the biggest challenges going to be for them?

JIM MYERS: Well, I think here in western Oregon, there’s going to be shifting crop portfolios, and particularly, in vegetables. Fresh market is very important. And we grow something like 65 different types of vegetables here in Oregon. And some of those may become more important. The fresh market aspect is where people seem to be wanting the foods that they eat.

Processing is pretty important here, but trends, general trends in processing are there seem to be less and less of it. There are shifts in where things are being grown. For example, we had a lot of sweet corn grown here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and now, that has shifted up to the Columbia Basin over on the east side of the Cascades. And maybe we will see things like processing tomatoes coming up from California or other crops that are big time in California that we can grow here.

IRA FLATOW: And kudos to you for having success with organic growing versus the big seed growers. That must feel very rewarding to you, right?

JIM MYERS: Yes. That has been a very interesting aspect of my breeding, has been breeding for organic systems. The thing about organic is it is– you can think of it as a different environment. And breeders generally are looking at how varieties are adapted to particular environments. So what we’re looking for are varieties that are better adapted to organic growing conditions.

I guess one of the ways to look at it is, in conventional agriculture, your crops are pretty much spoon fed. You’re giving them the fertilizer. You’re using herbicides to control weeds, pesticides to control pests and diseases. And when an organic situation, the environment is a lot more variable, you don’t necessarily have those particular aspects of farming under control.

And so you need varieties that are tough and resilient, and they can be stable under those types of conditions. And there may be certain complexes of pests and diseases that are different in organic compared to conventional. So it’s something we need to consider as a target environment when we’re doing our breeding.

IRA FLATOW: Well, Jim, this has been fascinating. Fascinating. I’m wishing you good luck in your coming retirement, and thanking you for all the work you’ve done in organic farming for us.

JIM MYERS: Well, thank you very much.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Jim Myers, Professor of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

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