Tomato's color uniformity: pretty or sweet

The next time you bite into a supermarket tomato and are less than impressed with the tart cardboard taste, blame aesthetics. A new study reveals that decades of breeding the fruits for uniform color have robbed them of a gene that boosts their sugar content.

Farmers pluck the fruits from the vine before they are ripe, and for about 70 years breeders have selected tomatoes that are uniformly light green at that time. This makes it easier to spot the tomatoes that are ready to be harvested and ensures that, by the time they hit supermarket shelves, the fruits glow with an even red color. Wild varieties, in contrast, have dark green shoulders, and that makes it harder to determine the right time to harvest.

In wild tomatoes, SlGLK2 (the Golden 2-like transcriptor factor behind the color change) increases the formation of chloroplasts, the compartments in plant cells that carry out photosynthesis. Chloroplasts use a green pigment, chlorophyll, to capture the sunlight plants need to grow. A higher number of chloroplasts gives wild tomatoes their darker green color.

In most tomatoes on supermarket shelves, however, SlGLK2 is inactive. While the mutation was beneficial to farmers, it's not such a sweet deal for consumers. Chloroplasts use the light energy they capture to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars. Tomatoes with a mutated SlGLK2 gene not only have fewer chloroplasts, they also sport less sugar.

So far, this is just a hypothesis. The real culprit affecting tomato flavor could also be a production system that picks tomatoes before they are ripe.

Read the paper in Science 29 June 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6089 pp. 1711-1715 DOI: 10.1126/science.1222218.

Happy B-Day Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Today is the 300^th anniversary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher, pedagogue, author, composer and botanist, born in Geneva on 28 June 1712. Rousseau became famous in 1750. The Academy of Dijon held a competition for academics to answer the question whether the boom of the sciences helped to "improve morality."

The answer Rousseau provided in his essay Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts shocked Europe and instantly made him famous. He won the competition with the disturbing notion that the development of civilization was in truth a story of decline and decay: in his "natural state" man lives independently and freely, but in society he is like a slave in increasingly tight chains — the evil lies in the essence of society. This provoked a scandal in this age of Enlightenment that celebrated the continuous, indeed inevitable, improvement of life by science and technology.

At age 50 he published his novel Emile on pedagogy (and the profession of a religion without a church) and his philosophical treatise Contrat Social on the reconciliation of human nature with political rule. He wrote: "The problem is to find a form of association in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." Only the law should be above the individual.

The books were burnt under a parliamentary decree in the courtyard of the Palace of Justice in Paris, and on 9 June 1762, Rousseau fled from Paris to his native Geneva, where this time his books were burnt in front of the city hall and he was declared persona non grata.

Rousseau did not propose solutions, he unveiled paradoxes. His arch-enemy Voltaire summed it up with a marginal note he wrote in one of Rousseau's books: "You always exaggerate everything." It took until his 200^th anniversary in 1912 to be accepted with Dunant and Calvin as one of the embodiments of the esprit de Genève. Today he is considered a forefather of environmentalism and the occupy movements, but his main message is that we continuously fail to meet our own expectations. Society has changed: Rousseau's estate is now part of UNESCO's world heritage.

berberine CI 75160

Berberine is strongly yellow colored, which is why in earlier times Berberis species were used to dye wool, leather and wood. Wool is still today dyed with berberine in northern India. Under ultraviolet light, berberine shows a strong yellow fluorescence. Because of this it is used in histology for staining heparin in mast cells. As a natural dye, berberine has a Colour Index (CI) of 75160.

Berberine is a quaternary ammonium salt from the protoberberine group of isoquinoline alkaloids. It is found in such plants as Berberis (e.g. Berberis aquifolium (Oregon grape), Berberis vulgaris (Barberry), and Berberis aristata (Tree Turmeric)) and Coptis chinensis (Chinese Goldthread, Huang-Lian, Huang-Lien), and to a smaller extent in Eschscholzia californica (Californian Poppy). Berberine is usually found in the roots, rhizomes, stems, and bark.

Recent progress in metagenomcs (databases, mathematical algorithms, modeling approaches, and software packages for the study of the gut microbiome) has lead to the suspicion that one cause for obesity might be the lack of sufficient Coptis chinensis in the diet. Are you fat? Check your yellowness.

America Invents Act

I wrote several times, that inventions rarely come from a stroke of genius. We are pack animals, and science is a common understanding of the physical world around us, not the physical world itself. Researchers work hard to further our understanding of the world and to uncover new synergies, creating sort of an ether of knowledge. This also includes tools and technologies to further this knowledge.

Mobile color selection feedback

Commercial color print workflows sometimes require manual intervention to adjust colors, for example to change a background color or the color of rules. Instead of aborting the job, sometimes the color can be changed on the fly. Typically this is accomplished with a color selection tool running on a mobile device, such as a pad computer or a smart phone.

Mobile color selection tools can use the built-in motion sensors for input. For output, due to the limited available screen space, the systems just show a swatch and maybe a color name. We describe a new output design that is well-tailored to motion-sensor based input. Using the right user interface paradigm allows users to work more efficiently, thus cutting costs and increasing profits.