That’s a Spicy... Tomato?

by KAT ESCHNER

SPICY FOOD IS POPULAR THE WORLD OVER, but one of the most popular active ingredients that makes food taste “hot ” —capsaicinoids, a group of chemical compounds — has useful properties beyond making food taste delicious. However, the plants that make capsaicinoids (the chili family, which botanists know as the genu Capsicum and which Australians know the larger, less-spicy variants of as... uh... capsicums) are small and have relatively low yields. But now a new paper in the journal Trends in Plant Science proposes an alternative: engineering tomato plants to produce capsaicinoids. What this means is that if all goes well, someday, you could enjoy a spicy tomato, or even be treated with capsaicinoids extracted from one. The paper, written by a group at Brazil’s Federal University of Viçosa, builds…

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Popular Science Australia (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2019

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