Nightingale project

[KarenO]

There is an album on northern gardener from this season if interested.
Looking for flavour and quality in a new white tomato in honour of nurses is the goal. The F3 narrowed things down to smaller fruited tomatoes a cherry, a larger cocktail and a mini beefsteak shaped saladette will go to the F4 which should decide the final nightingale to stabilize. I’m leaning toward a lot very pale large cocktail. Productive potato leaf plants.
Will see how they taste next year.
KarenO

[KarenO]

The F3 had some nice candidates. All potato leaf in cocktail and saladette sizes. Sweet flavours predominate which is expected.
My favourite is the cocktail cherry at this point but I will take the best saladette forward with it to F4. Here are some photos of fruit from this summer 2021. Bit of a difficult year with excessive heat. Despite that, the plants were very healthy producing well to the end of the season.
Potato leaf white cocktails and small beefsteak shaped saladette shown here.
Some are lighter than others all with clear epidermis . Best flavour in the cocktail selection with a green shoulder as it’s developing but that ripens to a lemon yellow shoulder with a white blossom end.
KarenO

[DK2021]

I have never really investigated this before, but is the potato leaf phenotype related to any other trait (e.g., stress/disease tolerance) or flavour characteristic? IIRC it is recessive, so I suppose it is useful for selecting out plants that are homozygous for potato leaf and whatever other genes are linked to this trait.

[KarenO]

Originally Posted by DK2021

I have never really investigated this before, but is the potato leaf phenotype related to any other trait (e.g., stress/disease tolerance) or flavour characteristic? IIRC it is recessive, so I suppose it is useful for selecting out plants that are homozygous for potato leaf and whatever other genes are linked to this trait.

There are several reasons I selected potato leaf in my project none of them based on scientific linkages per se but rather on personal preferences and my style of observation based trials and selection in my growouts year on year.
I find the heavy leaf cover an advantage in protecting the fruit. I find in my selections that the structure of the leaves and possibly a thicker cuticle helps resist ordinary fungus pathogens such as early blight and septoria better in my gardens. I like large dark green foliage that is capable of producing lots of sugars and I think it can lead to enhanced flavours although not always. I like a strong and vigorous plant in general.
Importantly for my small projects where I am breeding strictly to my own preferences I actually just really like the way they look.
I am interested in creating original tomatoes that suit me and grow well in my Canadian garden.
There are few, if any beautiful potato leaf white cocktail cherries. Few, if any potato leaf white saladettes. … but there soon will be
Low quality and often unstable Novelty can be fairly easy to find these days but high quality stable original tomatoes is what I’m working toward and It’s important to me not to do what’s already been done a lot.
I’m Not there yet with these but it’s a start and I’m happy with the progress so far. I’ll See where we are in 4 more seasons at F7 for my Nightingale. Segregation will continue and Plans can evolve but they will all be potato leaf, that is one certainty because That aspect of the phenotype is fixed from the original F2 selections because it was what I had planned the cross to create. It’s specifically why I selected the parents I used.
KarenO

[DK2021]

Thank you for the detailed response. I like the potato leaf phenotype myself, though that's mainly an aesthetic preference. The scientist in me does wonder about linked traits though. There is a reference genome (based on a Heinz commercial line) and a more recent pan-genome (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-019-0410-2) but I don't know how well annotated those are.

[KarenO]

I think youll be hard pressed to find much work on the subject simply because I think “ scientific” breeders haven’t been very interested in potato leaf tomatoes which have tended to be grown and collected by heirloom gardeners, small farmers and modern OP tomato enthusiasts like myself.
Perhaps now that flavour is becoming more of a focus in hybrid breeding there will be more attention paid to identifying specific genetic linkages in potato leaf tomatoes but I doubt it personally unless there is a commercial profit driven reason identified and I don’t believe that reason will be flavour. A commercially important motivation could be in regard to disease resistance but you’d think it would have already been done in that case and also presumably linked traits would need to result in commercial ( hybrid) F1 potato leaf plants bred from proprietary lines which Would be a pretty big departure from the regular leaf norm in hybrid tomatoes and would be rather like starting from scratch. I think it would need a very significant advancement to make that fly due to the need for both parents to be potato leaf to get a potato leaf F1. Seems to
Me even the “ heirloom marriage” style hybrids of recent years are probably all regular leaf. Although I’m not sure.
Just my musings regarding what would motivate and justify the cost of the study of possible beneficial linkages.
Meantime I guess I’ll carry on with my unscientific Canadian nurse white potato leaf lines just because I like them.
KarenO

[DK2021]

I love the goal! And you are probably right--I'd guess that there is or at least has been more commercial interest in traits like disease resistance and yield. It would be cool though to understand the genetics behind what "hobby" breeders (is that the right term?) have achieved. Particularly for flavour!

[KarenO]

I guess if science had all the answers Tomato nirvana would have already been achieved.
It will always be too complex in my opinion to narrow down to a few markers although it may help the science guys increase the odds
Even with all the genetic markers in the world it’s still field trials and human tastebuds that determines performance, actual disease tolerance and flavour.
KarenO, hobbiest will do I guess.

[DK2021]

There's a combination of science (certainly the understanding of genetics and plant anatomy helps) and art to this. That's true for so many fields: playing a musical instrument well is not accomplished by just mechanical accuracy.

Not to mention that nature always seems to figure out a way to stump us scientists. But that is part of what keeps it so interesting!
In any case I just love the idea of a potato-leaf white tomato to honour the work of nurses.