Photo: Supplied
A team of international scientists is working on giving tomatoes the spice of a chili-pepper.
The objective? To make it easier to mass produce large quantities of capsaicinoids - the molecules that give peppers their spiciness, and which, in addition to pepping up many a dish, have antibiotic properties, and are used in painkillers and pepper spray. In a recent paper published in Trends in Plant Science, researchers say by studying the DNA of the chilli pepper they could turn up the heat in tomatoes.
Plant biologist at the Federal University of Viçosa in Brazil Gus Zsögön explains to Kathryn Ryan.
