Thanks to domestication, and due to that small wild tomato fruits has been transformed to the desired juicy fruits we see nowaday. Unfortunately one can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Tomato cultivars have yummy fruits, while they are vulnerable to a broad categories of pests, possibly due to the lost of important pest resistant traits during domestication. This speculation is based on 1) the wild tomato plants have been widely known to resist against different herbivores, and 2) compared to cultivated tomato plants, the leaves of wild tomato plants differs remarkably in terms of the terpene production, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Therefore, it would be interesting to generate a tomato plant with cultivar-like fruits while producing terpenes found also in wild accessions, and to examine the performance of the plant in herbivory defense. Backcrossing, a technique adopted since the 3rd era of domestication is a traditional way to achieve this.
The picture below illustrate the transformation of fruit phenotype during the process.
