(credit: National Park Service)

Tomatoes were most likely 1st domesticated in the Andean region of Peru and Ecuador. From there, cultivation spread to Mexico, exactly where conquistadors located them, returning with them to Europe in the seventeenth century.

In the years considering that, we have bred them to create bigger fruit, to resist ailments, and to retain their shape and colour in neat supermarket pyramids. But the initial domestication event also chosen an agriculturally advantageous trait—it slowed down the plant’s circadian clock so it could thrive in the lengthy sunny days of the new latitudes it found itself in.

Circadian clocks are present in all kingdoms of life. They function to coordinate organisms’ metabolic and other activities with the external environment, notably the 24-hour light-dark cycle. Circadian clocks are known to regulate plant physiology and development and therefore nearly certainly influence the agricultural fitness of crops shockingly, they have not but been intentionally manipulated.