The tomato unzipped

If there ever was a celebrity magazine for fruits,

The fruit and vegetable world would be abuzz

Intrigued because Nature’s choice for its May cover?

A fruit which the leafy world treats as a commoner.

Solanum lycopersicum, a.k.a. the garden tomato

Unzipped its genes for humans in science

It’s gene count: thirty five thousand  

More than the humans’ twenty five thousand!

These genes coil in a dozen chromosomes

Genetic codes swarming like micro hives!

They give instructions for more than color, texture, size

Practically everything that makes the tomato alive!

If you have room for 950 megabytes

The genome of the tomato will fit your drive

But to decode the genes may need a bit of help

Email the International Tomato Annotation Group to yelp

The garden tomato belongs to Solanaceae

A family that also embraces eggplants, peppers and potatoes

Often nicknamed “nightshades,” because

Many of them grow best under, where else, but the shade

Remember as I now do Neruda’s Ode to Tomatoes

The Master described the tomato invasion of the kitchen

And the eventual murder we commit then

As we half these fruits of the Sun. 

But this murder in the kitchen is a MUST

For the garden tomato needs to meet the flame

To release its chemical lycopene of fame

And its leaves and vine, they’re poison, not part of the game.

The cliquish grape may be our best bet for wine

And the orange may be the only ball of citrus crystal mine

But it is the solanum lycopersicum that’s got lycopene

A good candidate for many of our ailings. 

This science ode I write now,

Sheesh, a poor shadow of the Master’s bow

But I hope it lifts some mystery from the tomato’s juicy canals

Instead of a murder, we can now give it many lives.

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