Purple and cancer free

Green means they’re young, red means they’re ripe and purple means they fight cancer. The tomatoes plant geneticist Cathie Martin is growing in her lab are genetically modified and packed with anthocyanin, a pigment that gives tomatoes a purple taint and acts as an antioxidant.

Martin and the John Innes Centre in Norwich fed cancer-prone mices on a diet of purple tomatoes, those mices out lived their peers that didn’t have the engineered tomato by about 50 days living 182 days compared to 142 for those that weren’t on the diet or were in a red tomatoes diet. Her results are publised in Nature Biotechnology.