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Potatoes evolved from tomatoes [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-07-31
The delicious, nutritious potato evolved from an ancestor of the tomato, one presumably just as slimy and pointless as the contemporary model. "This wasn't obvious," say the researchers who learned this.
The divergence occured nearly 9 millions years ago, according to a paper published in Cell, from wild tomatoes growing in the Andes. These vegetables hybridized with a plant called Etuberosum ("Tomato is the mother and Etuberosum is the father," said Sanwen Huang, a professor at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen) which resulted in its underground stems becoming massive globular stores of energy.
Interspecific hybridization may trigger species radiation by creating allele combinations and traits. Cultivated potato and its 107 wild relatives from the Petota lineage all share the distinctive trait of underground tubers, but the underlying mechanisms for tuberization and its relationship to extensive species diversification remain unclear. Through analyses of 128 genomes, including 88 haplotype-resolved genomes, we revealed that Petota is of ancient hybrid origin, with all members exhibiting stable mixed genomic ancestry, derived from the Etuberosum and Tomato lineages ca. 8–9 million years ago. Our functional experiments further validated the crucial roles of parental genes in tuberization, indicating that interspecific hybridization is a key driver of this innovative trait. This trait, along with the sorting and recombination of hybridization-derived polymorphisms, likely triggered the explosive species diversification of Petota by enabling occupation of broader ecological niches. These findings highlight how ancient hybridization fosters key innovation and drives subsequent species radiation.
James Mallet, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, says "The study is groundbreaking," a term I'm sure we all agree is particularly clever in context.
"The Indigenous people in the Andes have hundreds of varieties of potatoes," said Dr Sandra Knapp, a botanist at the Natural History Museum, London. "In Europe, we have maybe five – all from one species: Solanum tuberosum."
Check out the fabulous image below showing all sorts of ancient tomato/potato varieties vanished in the mists of time. It doesn't say so in the legend but I'm going to assume they can be named in temporal sequence "somato, rotato, quotato," etc.
If only a genial but ruthless billionaire would set about isolating the specific DNA of this lost world of tubers and establish a sprawling, remote theme park where one could observe and consume them!
Ancient hybridization underlies tuberization and radiation of the potato lineage [Cell]
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