Stole a picture from Pasha Kosenko. He bought purple tomatoes and was amazed. Pulling probably interesting stuff for my audience out of the comments.
This is a special breed of tomatoes, developed through genetic editing. Essentially, these are GMOs “on steroids”. But it’s one of the few examples where a GMO looks genuinely useful, not just pretty. Specifically, the Del/Ros1 and AtMYB12 genes (among others) have been introduced to induce the biosynthesis of anthocyanin, which not only gives a dark blue color but also acts as an antioxidant. Essentially, one tomato more or less equals a handful of currants of the same weight. The genes were taken from the common houseplant “snapdragon”, which produces a lot of it. The project was carried out by the John Innes Centre in Norwich.
We’re talking about anthocyanin. This pigment is found in various lilac and purple plants and berries (currants, blackberries). It has powerful protective properties. There are breeds of mice that die from cancer at 3 months old. If these mice are fed large doses of anthocyanin, they do not die from cancer. That is, if they eat anthocyanin, they do not get cancer. Ilya Kolmanovsky once said in an interview with Shikhman that one such tomato contains as much of this substance as a bucket of blackberries. My research shows that it’s not quite a bucket, but a good handful indeed, yet the point is, it’s quite beneficial (specifically, there’s 283.5 mg per 100g, in black currant – 190-270 mg/100g. But there are tomato varieties with up to 5000mg/100g, which is still far from a bucket of blackberries. There’s also a black crowberry or bearberry, where it’s about 4180 mg/100g). It’s also claimed that anthocyanins protect against bacteria, which is why such tomatoes don’t spoil for a long time.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 