Researchers Develop Tomato Plants that Contain Full Genetic Material of Both Parent Plants

In a study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, scientists established a system to generate clonal sex cells in tomato plants and used them to design the genomes of offspring. The fertilization of a clonal egg from one parent by a clonal sperm from another parent produced plants containing the complete genetic information of both parents.

In the system that Underwood and his team developed, meiosis was replaced by mitosis, a simple cell division, in tomato. In the so-called MiMe system (Mitosis instead of Meiosis) the cell division mimics a mitosis, thus sidestepping genetic recombination and segregation, and produces sex cells that are exact clones of the parent plant. For the first time, researchers were able to harness clonal sex cells to engineer offspring through a process called “polyploid genome design.”

The researchers performed crosses where the clonal egg from one MiMe tomato plant was fertilized by a clonal sperm from another MiMe tomato plant. The resulting tomato plants contained 48 chromosomes and the complete genetic repertoire of both parents.

For more details, read the article in the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research website.