Harmful Weed Threatens Popular Crop
Branched broomrape is a parasitic weed that threatens the United States’ supply of processing tomatoes – canned tomatoes and those used to create products like ketchup. Despite strong mitigation efforts, the weed has been detected in several counties in California, a state that grows 90% of the country’s processing tomatoes.
Current processing tomato varieties are not resistant to the weed and several features of branched broomrapes’ life cycle make them especially pernicious. They are not photosynthetic, and instead derive nutrients and water by attaching to tomato plants’ root cells, which limits crop growth. As the parasitism occurs underground, treating crops with herbicides is not effective. Additionally, branched broomrapes’ flowers make thousands of seeds, which can remain dormant and viable in soil for more than twenty years, potentially jeopardizing future processing tomato crops. These factors make combatting this weed especially difficult.
To address these challenges, researchers at the University of California, Davis led by Dr. Neelima Roy Sinha, professor of plant biology, are developing a tomato crop with branched broomrape resistance.