If you’ve noticed your beefsteak tomatoes have been a little beefier, it’s not a figment of your imagination. Produce is getting plumper these days. Farmers have been cross-breeding plants for hundreds of years to make bigger, better crops. But one fruit in particular, the tomato, has genes to thank for its newfound girth. Zach Lippman, an associate professor of plant genetics at The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and his team have been studying why some plants in the same species, under the same conditions, grow larger — or produce more fruit — than others. Plants, like people, have stem cells. Lippman said he noticed that in the “mutants,” or the specimens producing more than the typical amount of fruits, there was something amiss with their stem cell production. “When we looked closely under the microscope, we could see that the stem cell population was much larger than it should have been and this was a clue that there was something wrong in [the] genes that were contro
