Welcome to another week of doomsday escapism. We bring you a cool story about transpiring tomatoes, wonder about wild cotton and are suspicious about road-side super-plants. And we ask: What is your favourite idiom that translates poorly into English? 

Transpiration from Tomato Fruit Occurs Primarily via Trichome-Associated Transcuticular Polar Pores, Eric A. Fich, Josef Fisher, Dani Zamir, Jocelyn K.C. Rose, Plant Physiology Dec 2020, 184 (4) 1840-1852; DOI: 10.1104/pp.20.01105

• Milestones in Genomic Sequencing
• A wealth of discovery built on the Human Genome Project — by the numbers
• Modified genes can distort wild cotton’s interactions with insects; Study in Scientific Reports
• Gossypium hirsutum
• Global Plant Science Event Calendar
• The Weeds in Your Bird Seed | awkward botany
• Polina Volkova is doing research on radiation effects on plants
• Experts identify ‘super-plant’ that absorbs roadside air pollution
• It is Fishing Cat February my dudes
• Gone fishing: the fight to save one of the world’s most elusive wild cats 
• And of course February is Black History Month.

Check out the new episode of the Plant Book Club!

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

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• Tomatoes. We can’t live without them
• Very good
• They do dry out though eventually which is not so good
• When plants dry out (transpire), they do that with their stomata
• BUT: TOMATOES ARE ASTOMATOUS
• The fruits don’t transpire through stomata 
• HOW I ask HOW?!
• Well actually there are other ways to transpire
• 9 out 10 transpiration experts agree that the cuticular (wax layer) blocks a lot of transpiration, but not all of it
• BUT HOW do they transpire when there is a layer of wax that is impermeable to water
• Good question
• Nobody knows
• UNTIL NOW
• It could be through the cuticular. The wax layer could be differently THICK or made from different waxes
• or it could have spots where hydrophilic sugars let water through
• who knows
• guess what, we will know in like ten minutes
• So the researchers first needed things to compare. Without compare no information share
• They screened almost 400 (398) tomato varieties from three species in the field for their water retention abilities
• Some transpire a lot, others less so
• They picked exemples from both extremes: four low-water-loss lines, and five high-water-loss lines
• Now they could compare them and try to find what one group had that made it better than the other group
• They measured many things
• Was it cuticular thickness –> NO correlation with water loss
• What about cuticle permeance -> NAH
• Or cuticle composition? Guess what (no)
• Nothing correlated with the water loss behaviour
• so what could it be?
• THEY NOTICED SOMETIN
• to control for damage of the cuticle, they would use a water soluble staining solution. If the cuticle was damaged, it would show up as blue spots
• Oh my gosh there were so many blue spots but they were tiny
• Upon closer inspection it turned out to be small holes
• from trichomes!
• Trichomes are the pointy needle bits on tomato stems and fruit
• When the trichome breaks, it leaves a small spot that is water soluble
• and guess what: the tomatoes that easily lost water had more trichome holes than the ones that kept their water
• The whole story gives a good indication about tomato fruit transpiration and sets a goal for breeders: trichome number on fruit might best be kept low to avoid transpiration during transport
• Because interestingly: wild relatives of tomatoes have less trichomes on their fruit, but the more we domesticated them, the more trichomes they would accumulate as a biproduct of breeding