Novel tomato flavours introduced by plastidial terpenoid pathway engineering

Until recently breeding efforts centred on high-yield production while sacrificing flavour and taste quality traits of mass produced food products, such as tomatoes. The recent publication of Davidovich-Rikanati et al. demonstrates the technical feasibility of the genetical engineering of pathways in tomato plants to modify their fruit flavour profile in a proof-of-concept approach. The reported work ranks among an increasing number of reported successful modifications of edible plants with a focus on the benefits to end-consumers.