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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For comments, e-mail dererumnaturastar@hotmail.com.