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The tomatoes will only breed true so long as they are hand-bred or kept in an environment where no other types of tomatoes are around. And even then mutations w
by SamBam 2y ago
The tomatoes will only breed true so long as they are hand-bred or kept in an environment where no other types of tomatoes are around. And even then mutations will eventually creep in.
Same goes with the bacteria, except you may be talking about days or weeks instead of years.
- ceejayoz 2y agoTomatoes are largely self-polinating. Yes, mutations will creep in, but the gene will persist more based on a) can it be passed down to seeds and b) does it infer an advantage in natural selection?
- SamBam 2y agoThe vast majority of changes made by humans to food plants, mostly through selective breeding, but also through gene editing, do not infer a selective advantage (except toward more human breeding). Big red fat juicy tomatoes are a disadvantage in the wild, where hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection pre-humans produced small, hardy, efficient, easy to maintain fruits. Just like with pure-bred dogs, if humans suddenly disappeared it would probably only take a few decades for many species to return to muttier wildtypes. Sure, some gene-editing is to make the plants hardier. Some of those genes would likely remain. We're getting rather off-topic, though, which is about whether the bacteria in your mouth would be likely to mutate and/or swap genes with other bacteria in your mouth.