Botany

The potato love story

Knapp and her colleagues have found in a new study, appears to be the case for the world’s third-most important staple crop: The 8-to-9-million-year-old lineage that begat the modern potato may have arisen from a chance encounter between a flowering plant from a group called Etuberosum and … an ancient tomato. Tomatoes, in other words, can now justifiably be described as the mother of potatoes. The plant experts I interviewed…