Scientists have unraveled the entire genetic code of the tomato, the world’s second-most valuable vegetable after the potato.

From pasta sauce to curry, this South American transplant has found itself at home in cuisines around the world. It is the latest important food crop to yield its genetic secrets, published in Nature.

This breakthrough provides a glimpse at how the genetic revolution is helping keep our favorite foods on the table.

As befits this international vegetable, more than 300 scientists from 14 countries worked on the eight-year project.

Having a genetic map will provide a valuable starting point for breeders looking to make a better, hardier, more nutritious or simply tastier tomato.  

“This will be facilitated now by the fact that we now know not only what genes are there, but their order,” says Giovanni Giuliano with the Tomato Genome Consortium and a researcher at the Italian national energy agency, which also does crop breeding.

Though it is the first tomato to have its DNA sequence decoded, Giuliano says there’s nothing particularly special about the variety chosen for the project, known simply as Heinz 1706.

“It so happens that the day the person that made the first DNA library to be sequenced, they had Heinz 1706 seeds, and they started from that one. It is as simple as that.”

(Source: futurenow321)