Ever take a big bite out of a supermarket tomato and think, "This is just delicious!"? Probably not. After decades of aggressive breeding to make the industrially grown vegetable more durable, the tomato doesn't taste much like a tomato anymore. But hang on, tomatoes, molecular scientists are pondering your palatableness, reports Steve Mirsky in Scientific American.

During a recent scientific meeting in Boston, Harry Klee, professor horticultural sciences at the University of Florida's Department Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, said that although post-World War II "intensive breeding" techniques gave tomatoes a longer shelf life, these commercial gains came at the loss of taste. "Modern tomatoes focus on yields, basically making too many fruit at same time," Klee said during his talk. "The plant can't keep up with filling those fruits with nutrients. So the effect of what the modern breeders have done is basically to take the old tomatoes and add water."

Klee and his colleagues at UFL are working to infuse taste back into the tomato. The team of researchers had a panel of tasters rate heirloom tomatoes of old lineages, then they pulverized the vegetables and analyzed the chemical compounds that influence their taste. In their work, Klee and his colleagues have identified six volatiles – chemical compounds in the tomato that influence a person's sense of taste – that enhance sweetness and two that suppress sweetness.

"These volatiles can really fool the brain," writes Mirsky. For example, tasters rated the Martina tomato variety twice as sweet as the so-called Yellow Jelly Bean tomato, even though the Martina has less sugar. Tasters found the Martina sweeter because that variety has the six sweetness enhancing volatiles in higher concentrations than the Yellow Jelly Bean.

Given these findings, researchers are trying to figure out ways to breed more flavorful tomatoes that still hold up to the demands of mass production. "So that when you say tomato, I don't say blehhh," Mirsky adds.

Most brewers say that making beer is both a science and an art. Biotechniques reports this week that the science of brewing is making great strides thanks to molecular biology tools and technologies.

For instance, one group at Niigata University in Japan recently developed a method to isolate DNA from beer for subsequent PCR analysis. The group used some known primers and also designed novel primers based on species-specific DNA sequences from the main ingredients in beer — barley, yeast, and hops — then analyzed the quality and variety of those ingredients in 22 beer samples.

The Niigata University team also developed a magnetic bead-based sample prep method to separate DNA and eliminate PCR inhibitors from freeze-dried beer samples.

Using these techniques, the researchers were able to identify DNA from yeast, hops, barley, corn, soybean, and rice; and were able to detect 16 different barley cultivars across their samples — findings that they say could improve ingredient quality control or help brewers select the ideal malted barley for their elixirs.

Meantime, Biotechniques reports, James Madison University researcher Christine Hughey is using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze her pint.

After a line of single-hop beers — concoctions all brewed in essentially the same manner save the variety of hops used — piqued her interest, Hughey applied LC-MS to identify the distinguishing chemical characteristics that each hop variety imparted to the beer.

Hughey is now developing software to pinpoint which molecular features are unique to a particular hop in a particular year.

Daily Scan reports that it is happy to be part of a blinded tasting panel to assess the results of these experiments — all in the name of science, of course.

Harvard Medical School is shuttering its nearly 50-year-old primate research facility due to cost concerns, the Nature News Blog reports. The New England Primate Research Center currently houses about 2,000 monkeys, which the school says will be transferred to other primate centers or remain at NEPRC during the closure process, which could take two years.

In a statement, the school said that "driving the decision was the fact that the external funding environment for scientific research has become increasingly challenging over the past decade. Recent funding pressures have added uncertainty to this already-challenging fiscal context."

The center, blogger DrugMonkey points out, "lists an impressive series of accomplishments." That list includes contributions to establishing that AIDS is caused by a virus, developing nonhuman primate models of colon cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, and more.

NENPRC has also had its share of troubles. In a blog post, the Boston Globe says that the center had been cited by the US Department of Agriculture for animal welfare violations. The school says its decision to close the center was not related to these problems.

Nancy Haigwood, the director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, is critical of the move to close the New England facility. "It's very, very disturbing, disappointing, disheartening, shocking," she tells the Globe. "I think it's going to be very, very difficult to imagine that the investigators impacted by this decision will be able to keep up their momentum. We're talking about very talented senior investigators who are at the peak of their careers."

In this week's Science, a group of Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry researchers describe a new high-resolution mass spectrometric method for identifying and quantifying secreted proteins, demonstrating it on proteins released from immune cells upon receptor ligation. The work "enables a systematic dissection of signaling pathways and the identification of proteins with transcriptionally independent or unexpected extracellular functions," the researchers write.

Also in Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists Jeremy Wilusz and Phillip Sharp provide an overview of circular RNAs, which had previously only been found in pathogens, but recently have been discovered in a range of species, including humans. One circular RNA in particular is highly abundant in human brains and contains dozens of binding sites for a particular microRNA, miR-7. Because circular RNAs generally have multiple microRNA binding sites, Wilusz and Sharp suggest that other circular RNAs may also regulate the activity of microRNAs. They also propose that circular RNAs may act to bind and sequester RNA-binding proteins or "even base pair with RNAs besides microRNAs, resulting in the formation of large RNA-protein complexes."

It's DNA Day, and as NIH Director Francis Collins writes in a blog post, it's a "double anniversary."

Sixty years ago, on April 25, 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published their paper in Nature describing the structure of DNA, writing that their model has "two helical chains each coiled round the same axis" and "the novel feature of the structure is the manner in which the two chains are held together by the purine and pyrimidine bases. The planes of the bases are perpendicular to the fibre axis." That same issue of Nature included papers from Maurice Wilkins as well as from Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, Franklin's student.

Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962; Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958. Recently released letters, LiveScience reports, indicate that the scientists who worked on the DNA structure were first nominated for the prize in 1960, but that many of the nomination letters did not mention Wilkins; none mentioned Franklin, though the award is not given posthumously. Crick, LiveScience says, wrote to Jacques Monod saying that Wilkins should be included; Monod, it turns out, sent his nomination letter to the chemistry prize committee. Experts speculate that the two committees shared nomination letters, LiveScience adds.

Also on April 25, but 10 years ago in 2003, researchers announced completion of the Human Genome Project's goals. In the intervening years, Collins writes that about 20,500 genes have been uncovered and about 54 million genetic variations have been noted. "I am a physician; my dream is to see these advances in understanding the genome translated into better methods of prevention, treatment, and cure of disease," he writes, later adding, "As we celebrate this special day, let's resolve to use all means possible to bring the promise of the genomic revolution to those billions of people in the world who are still waiting and hoping for its benefits to reach them."

If you are looking for a last-minute way to celebrate, the University of Hull's Mark Lorch gives directions in the Guardian on how to make a model of DNA from licorice and gummy candy as well as on how to extract DNA from kiwifruit.

In Nature Biotechnology this week, a team led by Columbia University researchers report on the analysis of tumor-induced changes in mRNA expression of human metabolic genes in diverse cancer types, finding that the alterations are heterogeneous across different tumor types. Their analysis also suggests that expression changes of some metabolic genes may "enhance or mimic the effects of recurrent mutations in tumors," and that the various metabolic isoenzymes found to show tumor-specific changes hold promise as therapeutics targets.

Meanwhile, in Nature Methods, a group of international investigators describe a method, built around the concept of expression reversal of gene pairs, for identifying the determinants of cell fate. The team curated human expression data comprising 166 cell types and 2,602 transcription-regulating genes to develop the method, which enabled them to organize the cell types into their ontogenic lineage relationships. They used the approach to find genes in regulatory circuits that control neuronal fate, pluripotency, and blood cell differentiation.