A Tomato from an Oscar, dedicated to the film “The Martian”
Pubblished bykageja
Pending the Oscars, the film 'The Martian' already collects the first 'award': tomatoes. The colossal Ridley Scott it was in fact dedicated a new species of Australia's original tomato, christened 'Solanum watneyi' in honor of the hero Mark Watney, the expert in botany astronaut who manages to survive on the Red Planet thanks to his crops. The idea came to Chris Martine, biologist at Bucknell University in the US, which represents the first identikit of the plant on PhytoKeys magazine.
"Already the figures of heroes scientists are uncommon in Hollywood - explains the biologist - but this protagonist who studies plants as a profession in a desert environment in space is really something extraordinary ''. Hence the choice to be guided to his name for this new tomato that has a distant 'relationship' with vegetable Martians seen in the film. '' The plant that Watney try to cultivate Mars - says Martine - is none other than the potato of the Solanum tuberosum species, which belongs to the same kind of our tomato ''. The connection is not lost to Andy Weir, the author of the best seller 'the Martian' man which was made into the movie. '' There could be no greater honor for a botanist like Watney”, he writes in a post on Facebook.
The tomato Solanum Watney grows wild in the region Barra Judo / Gregory National Park, in northern Australia. Since the seventies, the local botanists had taken to calling the 'Bullita' nickname for breeding because of cattle that once was in the area, but no one had ever tried to analyze it in detail to identify its characteristics and ties of kinship with the other plants. In the end it has adopted the biologist Martine, who 'rediscovered' the plant while hiking with family and led to laboratory testing hundreds of seeds of this species and other kindred to be able to establish with certainty the identity.
Source: http://www.ansa.it
