What’s a Potato? A Nine-Million-Year-Old Tomato.
As a foodstuff, the potato can be baked, boiled, mashed, smashed, hashed, roasted, scalloped, fried and more. As a crop, it is among the world’s most important, with more than 350 million tons produced annually. Its efficiency — it requires less land than wheat or rice — and its ability to grow in a variety of environments has made it essential to global food security.
For all that, the plant’s origins have remained obscure. Everybody eats potatoes, it seems, but nobody can say where they came from.
Now scientists can, and the answer is: tomatoes. According to a study published on Thursday, potatoes may have arisen nine million years ago through the combining of genetic material from Etuberosum, a group of potato-like plants from South America, and wild tomato plants. According to the study, this hybridization event led to the origin of the potato plant’s distinctive feature, the tuber, an underground structure that stores nutrients and, as humans eventually discovered, is edible.
“A potato is the child of tomato and Etuberosum,” said Zhiyang Zhang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Cell. “We did this analysis and we found, ‘Oh, he’s a child of two plants.’”
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