Tomato Sweetness
Jessica Pursell
American InterContinental University
01/18/2015
Biology IP2

Introduction You and your neighbor have small kitchen gardens where you both grow tomatoes. His blotchy green and red tomatoes taste much sweeter than your perfectly uniform red ones. Could the sweetness of the tomatoes be effected by the green chloroplasts in the fruit?

Hypothesis I personally think that the green chloroplasts do play a part in the sweetness of the tomatoes because it doesn’t state how ripe the tomatoes were when they were eaten, what type of soil was used to plant them and if the same type of tomato seeds were used.

Controlled Experimental Method Scientists planted tomatoes and put a batch in sunlight and the others in full shade to find out how the tomatoes would grow and which ones would taste better. They found that the tomatoes in the shade, did not grow very well and did not taste good, whereas the tomatoes that had sunlight, grew to a standard size and had a sweeter taste.

Results
“The discoloration (ranging from a few millimeters to the top 1/3 of the fruit) is caused by a failure of green chloroplasts in tissue affected by YSD to develop into red chloroplasts. This modification is accompanied by a more random cell orientation and smaller cells relative to mature green fruit, these changes begin early in fruit development and cannot be reversed by delaying harvest.” (Tomatoes, 2015) Chloroplasts use sunlight and turns it into sugar in the fruit which means that the tomatoes that have more sunlight would be sweeter than the tomatoes that are not in as much sunlight. That process is known as photosynthesis.

Conclusion
What I took away from this experiment is that the more sunlight that tomatoes have, the sweeter they will become which would make the neighbors tomatoes better tasting.

References

Tomatoes, 2015,